‘I Protest, Therefore I Am’: Cosmo-Multiculturalism, Suburban Dreams, and Difference as Abjection in Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind The Moon

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Malaysian Australian writer Hsu-Ming Teo’s novel Behind the Moon depicts how conventional racism in multicultural Australia is re-enacted as a kind of cultural racism via the differentiation between a normative white culture and essentialised ethnic cultures. In particular, the novel portrays class as a cultural component mobilised to privilege middle-class and cosmo-multicultural culture over working-class and suburban culture. Such discursive shifts highlight the dynamic definition of minority status while, at the same time, reveal the limits of the imagined nation presumed as white. In my close reading of Teo’s narrative, ethnic subjects are captivated in a dialectic of protestation-abjection whereby old and new forms of cultural myths reproduce stereotyped difference and disarticulate ethnic self-delineation. The ideal of cosmo-multiculturalism, with its premise on a consumerist logic, immobilises difference as a fetishised object to be hailed, performed, savoured, but ultimately spat out undigested. Elaborating on contradictions within an ideology of liberal multiculturalism, I illustrate how the novel constitutes a re-signifying project that presents difference and abjection as transformative sources of national legitimacy.