Absent Others: Asian-Australian Discontinuities in Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog

Abstract

This article relies on the tropes of trauma and gothic haunting to examine Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (2007), in which the protagonist’s discarded Indianness allegorically parallels Australia’s unwillingness to confront the ghosts of its past. As the novel and its critique of settler culture seem to suggest, the Australian nation should arguably develop alternative cultural paradigms that seek to accommodate both otherness and the most unwelcome aspects of its history, instead of repressing them.