Monday ~ 29 June, 9:00 PM US Eastern / Tuesday ~ 30 June, 11:00 AM Australian Eastern
DESCRIPTION: This panel explores how literary genres represent and constitute different types of individual and collective subjectivities in Asian Australian literature. We build on recent work in critical genre studies that considers genre not as a strict category or a checklist of formal characteristics that literary texts must inhabit or exhibit. As John Frow argues in Genre, genre is “a symbolic action” that “makes things happen by actively shaping the way we understand the world” (2). In this “more reflexive model” of genre analysis, Frow continues, “texts are thought to use or perform the genres by which they are shaped” rather than strictly adhering to rigid frameworks; texts reconfigure genres instead of being contained or moulded by them (25). Weihsin Gui begins by examining how short stories, when considered as a collection rather than as single pieces of fiction, enable the constitution of what Shameem Black calls “crowded selves” in Merlinda Bobis’s The Kindness of Birds, in which a group of linked characters move between the Philippines and Australia across several stories. Then, Peter D. Mathews discusses three innovative Asian Australian life writing texts (Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing, Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice, and Andre Dao’s Anam) that deploy philosophical reflection, essayistic digression, and metafictional strategies. These “out-of-focus” memoirs unsettle notions of a unified subject, producing a fragmentation that can be both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical stance. Finally, Kelly Yin Nga Tse reads Ouyang Yu’s historical novel Billy Sing as an allegory of the cultural entanglement between China and Australia, placing Yu’s novel in conversation with his earlier scholarship on the representation of Chinese characters in Australian fiction. Tse argues that as a multicultural text Billy Sing crafts an inventive stylistic contact zone while endowing the historically racialized Chinese Australian subject with retrospective and projective powers.
PARTICIPANTS:
Weihsin Gui
Peter D. Mathews
Kelly Yin Nga Tse