Transformations in urban contexts : Asian-Australian women’s writing

Abstract

“Transformations in Urban Contexts” examines how Asian-Australian women writers of Southeast-Asian heritage complicate the interconnections between migrants’ identity transformations and their perceptions of urban places. It takes the form of a thematic study of nine selected texts by four writers, Singaporeanborn Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister (1994) and Swallowing Clouds (1997); Indonesianborn Dewi Anggraeni’s The Root of All Evil (1987), Parallel Forces (1988) and Uncertain Step (1992); Singaporean-born Simone Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to be Made (1994) and The Australian Fiance (2000); and Malaysian-born Hsu-Ming Teo’s Love and Vertigo (2000) and Behind the Moon (2005). Structuring my textual analysis of these texts around the theoretical frameworks expounded upon by Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity (1990), Joachim von der Thusen’s concept of the image-making of the city (2005), and Jacques Derrida’s idea of conditional hospitality (2000), I argue that these Asian-Australian women’s selected writing provides a literary space of transformation whereby ‘self’ and ‘other’ are both changed in the context of postcolonial cosmopolitanism and urban contexts, through key interactions in identity, place and gender. Drawing on these theories, the textual analyses identify five types of identity transformations depicted by these Asian-Australian writers, that is, transformations of spatial, cultural, gender, sexual and national identities. This thesis also articulates the recurring theme, in each text, of sharply contrasting images of the city as either a place of constraint or freedom. Aside from examining the city as a place of transformation, this thesis shows how the texts explore the city as a metaphor: as a place invested with meaning, and as the location for encounters, tensions, stereotypes, exclusions, surveillance and confinement within either or both Asian and Australian cultures. In doing this, it makes an original contribution to the field of migrant Australian literary studies where the connections between the city as a trope and the processes of migrant identity-formation have not been previously explored.