Chandani Lokuge

Mediating literary borders: Sri Lankan writing in Australia

Abstract The current Australian political and news-media agenda is very much about “outside” views, tending to treat migrants – including refugees and asylum seekers, for example – as one category of “others” devoid of race, culture or psychological specificities. A compelling aspect of literature’s power is that it transforms such encompassing public issues into humanist stories whose affective and cognitive resonances transcend the limits of political propaganda. It can communicate transculturally, establishing intimate, interpersonal and intercommunal conversations across time and space. Framed by theories of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in the contemporary Australian context, this article looks at the recent work of two Sri Lankan-born Australian novelists – Michelle de Kretser and Channa Wickremesekera, who write about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers – with the aim of exploring their alternative understanding of multiculturalism in Australia.

JOURNEY INTO VISHRANTI

Abstract This essay is based on my experiences as a Sri Lankan diasporic in Australia, my creative writing and academic research. Using the range of mountains named the Three Sisters and the Buddhist Vihara in Katoomba, New South Wales as a creative microcosm, the essay weaves into a philosophical meditation on the diasporics journey into true restfulness (vishranti). It is supported by theories of postcolonial hybridity and globalization.

Introduction: Realigning the margins: Asian Australian writing

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridised works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, debates on alterity, representational inequality, and consciousness of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012, 2).

Dialoguing with Empire: The Literary and Political Rhetoric of Sarojini Naidu

Poet, feminist, nationalist, orator and letter- writer, Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) was the most celebrated woman in India during her lifetime. When she visited Britain for the first time in 1895, the British literati who took her under their protective wing, stereotypically exoticized her as a ‘petchrw… a child or a toy’.1 They knew little of the complex layers of Naidu’s cultural background, an embryonic sense of ‘worldliness’, already evident in the young poet as a consequence of her immersion in both Indian and western cultures from early childhood. On the several visits that followed, the British continued to be guided by prevailing orthodoxies which frequently resulted in orientalist interpretations of her identity and poetry. This chapter offers an alternative reading of the formation of Naidu’s literary and political rhetoric that reconstitutes her (against the rise and fall of the British Empire) as an astute dialogist who strategically and expediently manipulated her way through the colonizer’s sometimes myopic ways of seeing.

The Novelist and Censorship: A Sri Lankan-Australian Perspective

Abstract In a political sense, my writing could be seen as interrogating mainstream templates, presenting an alternative philosophy that is neither totally Sri Lankan nor Australian. What limitations are imposed on my writing within this context? What external pressures (and freedoms) does each culture impose on my writing? How does my own cultural ethos affect my writing process? How do I resist, contest, disrupt and destabilize these impositions? This paper interrogates the preservation of a writers freedom of expression and commitment to the truths of art in the context of diaspora politics.