Wenche Ommundsen

‘This story does not begin on a boat’: What is Australian about Asian Australian writing?

With reference to recent debates about the politics of representation, this paper argues that a profound ambivalence about identity, and particularly about Asian Australian identity, is a common characteristic of much recent Asian Australian literary writing. It also asks whether this is the characteristic that marks this writing as specifically Australian. Tracing cultural contexts from the ‘pathologies’ of Australian multicultural debates to other transnational literary traditions, the paper uses examples from the writing of Brian Castro, Alice Pung, Ouyang Yu, Nam Le, Shaun Tan, and Tom Cho to speculate on the emergence of a new and distinct phase of transnational writing in Australia.

Poison, polygamy and postcolonial politics: The first Chinese Australian novel

Abstract This article examines the first novel written by a Chinese diaspora writer in Australia, The Poison of Polygamy (多妻毒), published in instalments in the Chinese-language newspaper Chinese Times (Melbourne) from 1909 to 1910. Set during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, the novel is nevertheless of its own time, reflecting the pressing concerns of a community in turmoil as the political upheavals of China in the final years of the Qing dynasty competed for attention with the disastrous effects of the White Australia policy. Taking the form of a picaresque and cautionary tale warning against traditional practices such as polygamy, opium smoking and foot-binding, the novel seeks to educate members of the lower classes of the Chinese community while embracing the republican cause against the Manchu rulers. The article argues that the progressive political agenda of the text (democratic, feminist) stands in sharp contrast to the view of the Chinese which prevailed in the white Australian community at the time.

Shahrazad in Cronulla: David Foster's Retelling of One Thousand and One Nights in Sons of the Rumour

ABSTRACT This reading of David Fosters Sons of the Rumour focuses on its frame story, a reworking of the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights. It provides an overview of the impact of One Thousand and One Nights on world literature and goes on to analyse how Foster reimagines One Thousand and One Nights in order to illustrate humanitys struggle between the spiritual and the material world. Foster constructs a parallel dilemma for Al Morrisey, a secular Australian Jew, and the Shah, a Persian Muslim. Differences between them favours Als secularism over the Shahs Islamic faith, and tends to harden and exaggerate stereotypes, following a typical Orientalist pattern by recreating the structure of One Thousand and One Nights for a Western understanding of and taste for Orientalist material.