Preoccupations of Some Asian Australian Women’s Fiction at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

Authors

  • Carole Ferrier University of Queensland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.16.2.2017.3619

Keywords:

Asian Australian fiction, women writers, diaspora

Abstract

This paper offers a look back over the rise of the visibility, and the rise as a category, of Asian Australian fiction from the beginning of the 1990s, and especially in the twenty-first century, and some of the main questions that have been asked of it by its producers, and its readers, critics, commentators and the awarders of prizes. It focuses upon women writers. The trope of “border crossings”—both actual and in the mind, was central in the late-twentieth century to much feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and race-cognisant cultural commentary and critique, and the concepts of hybridity, diaspora, whiteness, the exotic, postcolonising and (gendered) cultural identities were examined and deployed. In the “paranoid nation” of the twenty-first century, there is a new orientation on the part of governments towards ideas of—if not quite an imminent Yellow Peril—a “fortress Australia,” that turns back to where they came from all boats that are not cruise liners, containerships or warships (of allies). In the sphere of cultural critique, notions of a post-multiculturality that smugly declares that anything resembling identity politics is “so twentieth-century,” are challenged by a rising creative output in Australia of diverse literary representations of and by people with Asian connections and backgrounds. The paper discusses aspects of some works by many of the most prominent of these writers. In its mediation, through similar-but-different travelling women’s eyes, of the past and present histories of different national contexts, Asian Australian fictional writing is a significant and challenging component of the “national” culture, and is continuing to extend its audiences within, and beyond Australia. 

Author Biography

Carole Ferrier, University of Queensland

Professor Carole Ferrier came to Brisbane in 1972 with her first fulltime academic position in the Department of English (now the School of Communication and Arts) at The University ofQueensland. She is a Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies, and continues to research in the areas of gender, race, class, sexuality and literature. Publications include the books Gender, Politics and Fiction (1985/92); As Good as a Yarn With You (1992); A Janet Frame Reader (1995); a biography, Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary (1999), with Raymond Evans, Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (2004), and around 100 articles and book chapters. She has since 1975 edited the journal Hecate, with a wide international readership, and the Australian Women’s Book Review since 2000, when it became an on-line publication. Awards include UQ Graduate School Meritorious Supervision, QCU Emma Miller Hatpin, WILPF Hundredth Anniversary Peacewoman of the Year and Life Membership of the NTEU.

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Published

2017-12-15

How to Cite

Ferrier, C. (2017). Preoccupations of Some Asian Australian Women’s Fiction at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.16.2.2017.3619

Issue

Section

Essays and Articles on Australian Literature