Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators 9781783086634, 1783086637

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Omar S. Dahi is associate professor of economics at Hampshire College. Specializing in economic development and international trade, Dahi has published in various academic journals, including the Journal of Development Economics, Applied Economics and Southern Economic Journal. He also serves on the editorial committee of the Middle East Report and is coeditor of the Syria page at Jadaliyya. Firat Demir is associate professor of economics at the University of Oklahoma. Specializing in international finance and economic development, Demir has published in various journals including Applied Economics, Development and Change, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Development Studies, Review of Development Economics, Review of Radical Political Economics, Southern Economic Journal and World Development. He also serves on the editorial board of Review of Radical Political Economics. The Anthem Frontiers of Global Political Economy series seeks to trigger and attract new thinking in global political economy, with particular reference to the prospects of emerging markets and developing countries. Written by renowned scholars from different parts of the world, books in this series provide historical, analytical and empirical perspectives on national economic strategies and processes, the implications of global and regional economic integration, the changing nature of the development project, and the diverse global­Newto­local forces that drive change. Scholars featured in the series extend earlier economic insights to provide fresh interpretations that allow new understandings of contemporary economic processes.

Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators

Omar Dahi and Firat Demir

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outh–South Trade and Finance in the Twenty-First Century is a historical, theoretical and empirical examination of the rise of South–South economic relations and an attempt to place current South–South relations within their historical trajectory, reviewing how they differ from previous efforts such as new-regionalism. Through rigorous empirical analysis, the book uncovers the developmental implications of South–South trade and finance. The volume engages with burgeoning newdevelopmentalism to discuss how South–South economic integration and the rise of the South as an economic power and as an actor in multinational institutions both benefits and harms the developmental opportunities for poor and middle-income South countries. South–South Trade and Finance in the Twenty-First Century is a timely contribution to the international trade and economic development literature.

Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators

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www.anthempress.com

Sneja Gunew

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Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture Anthem Studies in Australian Literature and Culture specialises in quality, innovative research in Australian literary studies. The series publishes work that advances contemporary scholarship on Australian literature conceived historically, thematically and/​or conceptually. We welcome well-​researched and incisive analyses on a broad range of topics: from individual authors or texts to considerations of the field as a whole, including in comparative or transnational frames. Series Editors Katherine Bode –​Australian National University, Australia Nicole Moore –​University of New South Wales, Australia Editorial Board Tanya Dalziell –​University of Western Australia, Australia Delia Falconer –​University of Technology, Sydney, Australia John Frow –​University of Sydney, Australia Wang Guanglin –​Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China Ian Henderson –​King’s College London, UK Tony Hughes-​D’Aeth –​University of Western Australia, Australia Ivor Indyk –​University of Western Sydney, Australia Nicholas Jose –​University of Adelaide, Australia James Ley –​ Sydney Review of Books, Australia Susan Martin –​La Trobe University, Australia Andrew McCann –​Dartmouth College, USA Lyn McCredden –​Deakin University, Australia Elizabeth McMahon –​University of New South Wales, Australia Brigitta Olubus –​University of New South Wales, Australia Anne Pender –​University of New England, Australia Fiona Polack –​Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Sue Sheridan –​University of Adelaide, Emeritus, Australia Ann Vickery –​Deakin University, Australia Russell West-​Pavlov –​Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen, Germany Lydia Wevers –​Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Gillian Whitlock –​University of Queensland, Australia

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Post-​Multicultural Writers as Neo-​cosmopolitan Mediators Sneja Gunew

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2017 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–​76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA © Sneja Gunew 2017 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested. ISBN-​13: 978-​1-​78308-​663-​4 (Hbk) ISBN-​10: 1-​78308-​663-​7 (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-​book.

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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Introduction.  The World at Home: Post-​Multicultural Writers as Neo-​cosmopolitan Mediators The Argument Vernacular Cosmopolitanism Post-​Multiculturalism: A Future Anterior Chapter Outlines

1 2 7 10 13

1. Who Counts as Human within (European) Modernity? Patchwork Selves and Modernity “European” as Floating Signifier in the Settler Colonies Who Counts as European? Cosmopolitanism and Occidentalism

19 20 23 25 27

2.

33 34 35 37 41 43 44 45 47 51

Vernacular Cosmopolitans Allegories of Cosmopolitanism: “Eastern” Europe Imagining the Stranger: Olivia Manning, Rose Tremain and Rana Dasgupta Imagining Oneself as Stranger: Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Müller Interpellated as Stranger (Imagining Home): Antigone Kefala Eur/​Asian Vernacular Cosmopolitans Cosmopolitanism and World Literature Imagining the Stranger: Kyo Maclear Imagining Oneself as Stranger: Fiona Tan Interpellated as Stranger (Imagining Home): Ann Marie Fleming

3. The Serial Accommodations of Diaspora Writings The Dubious Consolations of Diaspora Criticism Resident Aliens: Diasporic Women’s Writing Politics of Location: Here as Much as There Revising Unhomely Histories Reviewing the Homeland after Diaspora

53 53 54 59 63 66

4. Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Claims of Time “Moving between Languages, Bobby Wrote on Stone” Ambiguous Archives

71 73 76

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Cannibal Christianity The Planetary Deep Time

5. The Cosmopolitanism in/​of Language: English Performativity English Performativity Ouyang Yu: The English Class Wang Gang: English Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-​English Dictionary for Lovers Ruiyan Xu: The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai Coda

77 80 81 85 86 89 91 93 94 95

6. Acoustic Cosmopolitanism: Echoes of Multilingualism Acoustic Palimpsests Tsiolkas: Barracuda Castro: The Garden Book Clarke: “The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa” Post-​Multiculturalism

97 97 102 105 107 108

Conclusion.  Back to the Future and the Immanent Cosmopolitanism of Post-​Multicultural Writers

111

Notes

123

Bibliography

135

Name Index

151

General Index

155

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Written over the past decade, this book represents the ways in which I process the key questions that have animated all my work: how to render more complex the monolithic cultural entities that national cultures are always threatening to become. It also represents my further engagement with the differences and similarities I found in moving from an Australian to a Canadian context 23 years ago. My thanks to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding early parts of this project. My profound thanks to those Australian colleagues who have kept me in touch with developments in Australian literary and cultural studies: Wenche Ommundsen, Nikos Papastergiadis, Ivor Indyk, Fazal Rizvi, Gillian Whitlock, Susan Sheridan, Nicole Moore, Carole Ferrier, Brigitta Olubas, Robyn Morris, Antigone Kefala and Helen Nickas. My thanks, equally, to those Canadian colleagues who have helped me become more immersed in comparable Canadian debates: Margery Fee, Chris Lee, Renisa Mawani and Laura Moss. And profound thanks as well to my students, particularly those graduate students who entrusted me with being their supervisor or on their supervisory committees: Kim Snowden, Terri Tomsky, Daniella Trimboli, Bianca Rus and Michelle O’Brien. Versions of some of the chapters have appeared in the following: “Serial Accommodations: Diasporic Women’s Writing,” Canadian Literature 196 (Spring: 2008), 6–​15. “Resident Aliens: Diasporic Women’s Writing,” Contemporary Women’s Writing. Oxford. 2009, 3: 28–​46. “Estrangement as Pedagogy:  The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” In After Cosmopolitanism. Edited by Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin and Bolette Blaagard. 132–​148. London: Routledge (GlassHouse Book), 2013.

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“ ‘We the Only Witness of Ourselves’: Re-​reading Antigone Kefala’s Work.” In Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey. Edited by Vrasidas Karalis and Helen Nickas. 210–​220. Melbourne: Owl Publishing, 2013. “Back to the Future: Post-​Multiculturalism; Immanent Cosmopolitanism.” In The Cosmopolitan Ideal:  Challenges and Opportunities. Edited by Sybille De La Rosa and Darren O’Byrne. 81–​97. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

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Introduction THE WORLD AT HOME: POST-​ MULTICULTURAL WRITERS AS NEO-​ COSMOPOLITAN MEDIATORS Elite cosmopolitan literary intellectuals are not the only cosmopolitans in a globalizing world. (Werbner 2012, 12) Once again, around the world we witness and endure traumatic displacements where citizens are transformed into refugees and asylum seekers on a massive scale. In terms of the global rhetoric that defined the beginning of the millennium, Europe (which symbolically includes North America and Australia) has become a focus for those seeking asylum. And yet what we see are those on the edges of Europe (those who aspired to become part of the economic European Union) create razor-​wired barriers that keep out the refugees from countries torn by conflicts often created by European attempts to structure the globe in ways that would best facilitate transnational capitalism. For someone who recalls growing up in Australia alongside Hungarian refugees in the 1950s, the recent developments in Hungary and elsewhere in relation to closing borders to refugees are difficult to comprehend. As we move further into the twenty-​first century, West and non-​West are congealing once again into monumental phantasmatic binaries. An even more disheartening sign is that the “non-​West” appears increasingly to be synonymous with Islam—​an unexpected outcome of Edward Said’s analysis of “orientalism” that was initially such an enabling interpretive lens. In the face of these developments, the debates in neo-​cosmopolitanism over the past 15 years constitute recent attempts to imagine a new critical framework that is more culturally inclusive and to think in “planetary” rather than “global” terms. Here is Gayatri Spivak on this distinction: “The globe is on our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, indeed are it. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe” (2012, 339).

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What might it mean to assume an approach in which citizens of and in the world include all its parts? To unpack this last statement, the underlying concern is: what might it mean to consider everyone as having these rights? Due to various histories of imperialism and their latest incarnation in a globalization fueled by capitalism, as well as the structures of diverse nationalisms, this is a complex question to address. Furthermore, how might literary and cultural studies be situated in relation to these concerns as part of a pedagogical project? As Walter Mignolo reminds us, “Cosmopolitanism […] is not something that is just happening. Someone has to make it happen” (2012, 86). One way to narrow the analytical task is to ask whether a seminar on neo-​cosmopolitan literature would differ from one on world literature and how a reimagined post-​multiculturalism might relate to either.

The Argument But let me pause here and state that this book is emphatically not a comprehensive account of post-​multicultural writing or writers. My examples are just that—​eclectic choices rather than an attempt to be comprehensive—​and while I engage with critics in both Canada and Australia, there is no attempt to be comprehensive in either context. The idea is to put into conversation these two contexts of critical analysis that share much as well as differing in illuminating ways: both Australia and Canada are grappling with their histories of colonial invasion, as well as with their recognition that they are shaped by many waves of discrepant migrations, including these most recent waves of asylum seekers who have been processed rather differently in Canada than in Australia (Perera 2015). A remark by one of the anonymous reviewers of a draft of this book is completely accurate—​that my arguments are rendered elliptically. It captures my approach perfectly and is due to my aversion to the lecturing mode that typically presents answers rather than questions. Therefore, my 45 years of teaching have evolved another pedagogical rhetoric and method that I have fumblingly termed a “stammering pedagogy” and “pedagogy as estrangement,” amongst others. All are meant to convey the idea of rendering in print multiple or parallax perspectives—​providing listeners and readers with a number of points of view that are often inherently irreconcilable. The idea is to encourage an engagement that allows the listener/​reader to think through and arrive at their own (provisional) point of view. But I  am also responding to the reviewers’ frustrations, so here is an attempt to explain and clarify my approach and to unpack some of the major concepts I employ and the reasons for doing so.

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This book’s guiding principle is that we need to move beyond the (often unacknowledged) monolingual paradigm (an assumed model) that dominates Anglophone literary studies, particularly within settler colonies such as Australia. Using Lyotard’s concept of “post” as the “future anterior” (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-​multiculturalism that goes back to salvage elements that have been forgotten in multiculturalism’s contemporary denigration—​most notably the element of multilingualism. I attach this discussion to debates in neo-​cosmopolitanism over the past decade to create a framework for re-​evaluating post-​multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. I link these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, China and India to suggest a new framework for literary and cultural studies. This book provides an overview of concepts in the field of literary and cultural neo-​cosmopolitanism (peripheral cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitanism from below) and demonstrates their usefulness in re-​interpreting notions of the spatial and the temporal to create a new cultural politics and ethics that speak to our challenging times. The neo-​cosmopolitan debates have shown that while we are more aware of being connected than ever, this understanding is accompanied by a blindness concerning many groups, histories and geopolitical areas that were overlooked in the past and that need to be brought to the center of our cultural criticism so that we can engage more ethically and sustainably with global cultures and languages—​including those at risk. The discussion also questions traditional ways of conceptualizing space and time by invoking the planetary to set against the ubiquitous use of the global and by referring to deep or geological time (often associated with Indigeneity) as distinct from a linear colonial time that undergirds most national histories. In a wide-​ranging (and highly eclectic) study of world literature, I juxtapose Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Castro, Ouyang Yu, Yasmine Gooneratne, Maxine Béneba Clarke, Antigone Kefala and Kim Scott from Australia with Canadian writers such as Shani Mootoo, Anita Rau Badami, Ann Marie Fleming, Kyo Maclear and Tomson Highway and connect them to “other” Europeans such as Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Müller (a recent Nobel prizewinner whose writings straddle Rumania and Germany) and Fiona Tan (a visual artist based in Amsterdam). This book analyzes diaspora texts by Xiaolu Guo, Ruyan Xu and Wang Gang from China within neo-​imperial globalization where global English often functions as metonym for Western values. By introducing the acoustic “noise” of multilingualism (accents within writing) to the constitutive instability within monolingual English studies, I attempt to show that within global English, diverse forms of “englishes” provide routes to more robust recognition of the significance of other languages that create pluralized perspectives on our social relations in the world.

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One of the palpable ways in which I try to unsettle critical reading is to insert the voices of other critics directly. Instead of always summarizing their arguments, I  use quotations to emphasize the idea of critical analysis as a dialogue—​more akin to a play script than the homogenized critical texts with which we are all too familiar and that we train our students to produce. It is true that such a method is akin to stones in a stream—​I know because colleagues have often alerted me to this stylistic “fault.” This lack of flow is deliberate. At the center of this attempt to defamiliarize the reader, I  question the familiarity of global English itself. For example, Brian Castro points out in an interview published in 2011 that “not everything is in English. We just make this assumption, well, Anglos make this assumption that the masterpieces of the world will automatically be translated into English. It doesn’t hold true, because there are huge masterpieces out there that English speakers will not ever access because they can’t speak that language” (Castro in Brun 2011, 32). It is also useful to recall the point Deleuze and Guattari made in A Thousand Plateaus that: “There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers simultaneously” (1987/​2003, 101). Analyzing the neo-​cosmopolitan debates of the past 15 years, it is clear that there is a discipline-​based struggle around who “owns” these new definitions of cosmopolitanism in the sense of providing its salient critical categories and definitions. Emanating in the first instance from political science, philosophy, sociology, legal studies and anthropology, neo-​cosmopolitanism does not appear to have been consistently engaged by literary and cultural studies, at least not in a comprehensive manner.1 Conspicuous exceptions are Tim Brennan, who has been highly critical of the neo-​cosmopolitan debates and has identified them as largely synonymous with a global Americanization, including the fetishization of elite cosmo-​celebratory figures such as Salman Rushdie or Amitav Ghosh as designated representatives of all so-​called Third World cultures. There was also the 2002 collection Cosmopolitanism (based on a special issue of Public Culture) in which Walter Mignolo spoke of critical cosmopolitanism in relation to border politics (2002), which has an urgent relevance again today. In addition, there is the generative mediation provided by Pheng Cheah, whose coediting with Bruce Robbins of the landmark text Cosmopolitics was a pioneering map of the terrain and whose more recent forays into redefinitions of world literature are shaping current attempts to situate literary studies more solidly in the neo-​cosmopolitan debates.2 Bishnupriya Ghosh’s analysis of the contemporary Indian novel that identifies fourth-​generation writers in English as “cosmopolitical writers [who] render India ‘communicable’ to a global audience” (2004, 50) and Berthold Schoene’s study, based on the philosophical categories of Jean-​Luc Nancy, of a new cosmopolitan novel exemplified by writers

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such as Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell represent other contemporary directions. Robert Spencer’s juxtaposition of cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism that emphasizes a cosmopolitan reading rather than identifying cosmopolitan texts resonates with this book as well. As Spencer puts it, “ ‘Cosmopolitan criticism’ is the name I give to a literary critical approach which is alert to the ways in which postcolonial texts make available for scrutiny both the nature of colonial violence and the latency and desirability of cosmopolitan alternatives” (2011, 7). The domain of “transcultural” literature, identified by mostly German scholars, overlaps with this last area.3 My own book continues my work over three decades (Gunew 1994, 2004), analyzing the ways in which diasporic, immigrant, multicultural and ethnic minority writers are situated in a kind of cordon sanitaire around settler-​ colonial national cultural formations. The conditions under which they gain visibility are often the very ones that appear to consign them to the margins in perpetuity with the exception of a few token figures (often interchangeable) who tend to function as emblematic of neoliberal cultural tolerance. In response to this dynamic, the thesis in this book is a simple one: if we engage seriously with the terms offered by the debates in neo-​cosmopolitanism, such writers would be given critical recognition as mediating figures that facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global or, in the more felicitous term suggested by Spivak, Gilroy and Cheah, the planetary. The very elements that have been traditionally deployed to illustrate their constitutive suffering and oppression (the “migrant condition”; migritude4), the belief that they are at home nowhere or in more than one place (and thus constitutively disloyal and “unpatriotic”), could be rethought to comprise their greatest attribute—​that they can navigate the structures of belonging in numerous ways, not least by putting into question the complacent assumptions or self-​evident universalisms that undergird many forms of both nationalism and globalization. As Gerard Delanty puts it, “Despite the western genealogy of the word cosmopolitanism, the term is used today in a ‘post-​western’ register of meaning. In this sense it is ‘post-​western’ orientation that is located neither on the national nor global level, but at the interface of the local and the global. […] Taken together, these dimensions and characteristics of cosmopolitanism suggest a broad definition of cosmopolitanism as a condition of openness to the world and entailing self and societal transformation in light of the encounter with the Other” (2012, 41). In the struggles around who establishes the rules of engagement with neo-​cosmopolitanism, the late Ulrich Beck is credited with reviving the cosmopolitan debates within political theory under the broad category of risk management. As he puts it in an essay published with Eugene Grande, “It has become a commonplace that national institutions alone are unable to cope

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with the challenges of regulating global capitalism and responding to new global risks. […] It is no less obvious that there is no global state or international organization capable of regulating global capital and risk […] in industrial society. Instead, we can observe a complex reconstitution of political authority, with which to organize the mechanisms of global economic regulation, risk management and control in ways characterized by new forms of political interdependence” (2010, 410). As they go on to point out, we live in a world of global relations where the risks that threaten the planet (the urgency to address international human rights, global warming etc.) cannot be contained by nation-​state boundaries. In other words, we are faced at every turn with the realization that we are interconnected in ways that go beyond the old notions of internationalism but that these forces have unpredictable implications. As Gerard Delanty phrases it, “The world may be becoming more and more globally linked by powerful global forces, but this does not make the world more cosmopolitan” (2009, 2). The rise of new communication technologies and social networking has also fueled our awareness of being connected differently. Beck and others have rooted their version of cosmopolitanism in Immanuel Kant’s ideas, and as many have pointed out, his work is inescapably Eurocentric.5 Indeed Beck’s enterprise is closely aligned with setting up a model for cosmopolitanism that speaks implicitly and explicitly to the travails of the European Union. When cosmopolitanism’s roots are linked to earlier antecedents in the Stoics, other possibilities open up (Nussbaum 2010). For example, some commentators identify the nomos (the law) with an etymological split that depends on whether one puts the accent on the first or second syllable. In the first (nómos), it relates to the sedentary and the propertied, and in the second (nomós), to the nomadic (Vardoulakis 2008). The considerable tensions between the two are addressed later in this study. Part of the problem with and the reason for the resistance to cosmopolitanism is that its discourse is often governed by a rhetoric of universalism (and includes supposedly indisputable terms such as universal human rights) and by groups (such as Beck’s European model) that attempt to usurp the place of the universal. But as Ernesto Laclau reminds us, “If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary contents; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representations” (2003, 367). For example, Beck’s linkage of cosmopolitanism to a European universalism appears immediately un-​cosmopolitan to Mignolo and others who see universalism as the antithesis of what the new cosmopolitanism is trying to construct. Mignolo is among many who try to qualify cosmopolitanism to clarify a particular ethical context: “How then does de-​colonial cosmopolitanism

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relate to the project of dialogue among civilizations? And what might de-​ colonial cosmopolitanism and de-​colonial conversations among actors and institutions of different civilizations look like as options to current debates on cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and on dialogue among civilizations on the other?” (2012, 90). One pathway through the maze of writing could be to focus on cosmopolitanism as a pedagogical method that functions best, in general terms, as a form of denaturalization that would enable receptivity to other ways of “being at home in the world.” As Woodward and Skrbis point out, “being cosmopolitan does involve having access to repertoires of universalism, though such discursive resources and everyday practices are not necessarily articulated or deployed in universal and consistent ways but rather have an emergent and performative quality, depending on the facilitating contexts of environment and social setting” (2012, 129). Cosmopolitanism deals with the world, worlding, the planetary and with Jean-​Luc Nancy’s notion of mondialisation, explained by Berthold Schoene as “the creation of the world […] it originates and stays rooted in the specific, unassimilable singularities of the local […] mondialisation promotes cosmopolitan agency as non-​directive ‘struggle’ ” (2009, 24) in discrepant ways. Part of the pedagogy would be to point out that in fact all cosmopolitanisms are vernacular and so the methodology would be to concentrate on the ways in which these texts rooted in the vernacular open up a different engagement with the world.6

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism My use of the phrase “vernacular cosmopolitanism” represents an attempt to draw attention to the consistent tension between the singular and the plural that inhabits notions of national as well as global and diasporic literatures—​ there is always an attempt to show a “tribe” as well as the singularity of the writer or characters in a text.7 I link this to Homi Bhabha’s distinction between the performative and pedagogical nation as well as to Jean-​Luc Nancy’s distinction between the singular and the plural. The term “vernacular cosmopolitanism” signals a departure from either an elitist or a “banal” cosmopolitanism (dedicated to consumption), but what does this term attempt to capture? Vernacular cosmopolitanism encompasses everyday cosmopolitanism as well as a cosmopolitanism from below: a subaltern and peripheral cosmopolitanism that makes claims for the recognition of the cosmopolitan nature (interactions with globalization) that are associated with groups that have been marginalized by nationalist enterprises—​Indigenous peoples, immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, itinerant labor groups (Gastarbeiter) seeking work across the world within contexts of acute vulnerability (Nyers 2003). The oxymoronic dynamic of the

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phrase “vernacular cosmopolitanism” reflects the double movement within these debates. Sheldon Pollock points out that by including both the privileged world of the Greek polis and the Roman verna or house-​born slave, the phrase purposefully signals its inherent contradiction (2002). And this is precisely its appeal.8 In Homi Bhabha’s coinage of the phrase, the concept attempts to capture the “growing, global gulf between political citizenship, still largely negotiated in ‘national’ and statist terms, and cultural citizenship which is often community-​centred, transnational, diasporic, hybrid” (2002, 25). Bhabha also associates this concept with minorities who don’t necessarily wish to claim majoritarianism and whose defining impetus is that of translating across cultures in an economy marked by iteration rather than teleology (1996).9 The way Bhabha structures these arguments pertains to his familiar dyad: the performative and pedagogical nation in which adding to does not mean adding up. A  comparable argument occurs in Paul Gilroy’s desire for a cosmopolitanism that encompasses a new planetary consciousness whose antecedents he locates, for example, in Montesquieu’s eighteenth-​century satiric text Persian Letters (2004). Discrepant modernities are the general contexts, and vernacular cosmopolitanism (Bhabha 1996, 2002; Hall 2002) is the direction of this model that is primarily animated by consideration of the marginalized and wretched of the earth—​those who do not control the conditions of their mobility. Within cultural theory, cosmopolitanism represents an impetus to use the literary and cultural productions of artists from those marginalized or subaltern groups as an entry point to question the supposed discreteness and homogeneity of dominant (rather than emergent) national cultures as well as the universality of globalization.10 In Homi Bhabha’s wording, “The postcolonial endorses a vernacular cosmopolitanism that has to translate between cultures and across them in order to survive, not in order to assert the sovereignty of a civilized class, or the spiritual autonomy of a revered ideal. Vernacular cosmopolitans are the heirs of Walter Benjamin’s view of modernity, that every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism” (2002, 24). One model is to see “subaltern” artists and writers as occupying a Derridean supplementary space that inherently questions the supposed plenitude of a national culture. The claims are modest ones: to attempt to decenter one’s own vision of the world in order to see flaws that include an acute perception of unequal global power relations. Paul Gilroy provides an example of such an approach in his Postcolonial Melancholia. “There is another quite different idea of cosmopolitanism to be explored here. Its value to the politics of multiculturalism lies in its refusal of state-​centeredness and in its attractive vernacular style. In a sharp contrast with the recipes for good governance that have been pronounced from up above, this variant might be described as ‘vulgar’ or ‘demotic’ cosmopolitanism” (2005, 67).

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In relation to this approach, Peter Nyers’s work on “abject cosmopolitanism” is also pertinent. He defines this concept in the following way, “Abject cosmopolitanism does not aim for a higher ground so much as to burrow into the apparatuses and technologies of exclusion in order to disrupt the administrative routines, the day-​to-​day perceptions and constructions of normality” (2003, 1089). Nyers links these disruptions to the ethical accommodation of asylum seekers and refugees.11 Such a perspective is also captured in Stuart Hall’s plea for what he terms an “agnostic democratic process” in which “We witness the situation of communities that are not simply isolated, atomistic individuals, nor are they well-​bounded, singular, separated communities. We are in that open space that requires a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism, that is to say a cosmopolitanism that is aware of the limitations of any one culture or any one identity and that is radically aware of its insufficiency in governing a wider society, but which nevertheless is not prepared to rescind its claims to the traces of difference, which makes its life important” (2002, 30). Acknowledging these traces of difference, without seeing them as adding up to a master narrative, is at stake here. Elsewhere I have referred to the process of suggesting differences without producing comprehensive answers as a stammering pedagogy (Gunew 2004, 125–​126). Following through on the logic of vernacular cosmopolitanism in global relations, the only groups who, in a sense, are mandated at this historical point to provisionally occupy the universal are those who have been brutally excluded: undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, Indigenous groups. The argument here is that when engaging in the process of ethical decolonization, the former colonizers need to put the world views (views of the world) of the excluded at the center in order to be able to abdicate their own claims to universalism and to enable the Indigenous inhabitants of global empires to assert their rights to have rights and to decolonize their own history. What then does literary cosmopolitanism offer? To some degree these debates are circulating within the framework of new ways of conceptualizing “world literature.” As Pheng Cheah points out, “World literature is an important aspect of cosmopolitanism because it is a type of world-​making activity that enables us to imagine a world” (2012, 138). Paul Gilroy suggests that “imagining oneself as a stranger […] might instructively be linked to actually becoming estranged from the cultural habits one was born into” (2004, 78) and cites the productive example of George Orwell within colonial England (85). I use Gilroy’s conceptualization of the stranger to structure the second chapter. We can also think of texts that do comparable work such as Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark or Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. These kinds of perspectives also emerge from those diasporic figures who have been designated “multicultural” in some national contexts. Of course, as with all

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“imagined communities,” we are dealing with fantasy structures. With their rhizomatic roots in diaspora, post-​multicultural writers/​artists connect the post-​nation-​state to the global in new ways:  they redefine and critique the nation as well as globalization by helping to dislodge the sense of entitlement held by dominant groups.

Post-​Multiculturalism: A Future Anterior But how might one move from the old dynamics of state multiculturalism to new conceptualizations of this field as post-​multicultural? One approach is to use the “post” in Lyotard’s manner of going back to ask what was left out in the various constructions of multiculturalism in its double usage: first, as a way for states to manage difference, and, second, the attempts by various groups and individuals who felt excluded from national formations to argue for their own supplementary inclusions. The logic Lyotard proposed was that the condition of Postmodernism consists in part of going back to elements not taken up by Modernism so that the “post” of Postmodernism becomes not simply a future orientation so much as the future anterior (the future in the past) structured by anamnesis, a recollection or going back that discovers other possibilities for alternatives to the period and movement we have come to call Modernism. Tu comprends qu’ainsi compris, le “post-​” de “postmoderne” ne signifie pas un mouvement de come back, de flash back, de feed back, c’est-​ à-​dire de repetition, mais un process en “ana-​”, un process d’analyse, d’anamnèse, d’anagogie, et d’anamorphose, qui élabore un “oubli initial.” (1986, 126) [My trans.: You understand that when understood like that, the “post” of the postmodern does not mean a movement as in come-​back, flash-​ back, feed-​back, that is to say a repetition, but a process of “ana,” a process of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy, anamorphosis, which elaborates on an “initial forgetting”]. In other words, in this precondition to Modernism, we would not find the grand narratives of nationalism or internationalism, or even of West and non-​ West, but the petits récits of those differences within—​ethnicity, Indigeneity and gender—​all of which had of course always been lurking there. I am suggesting that inside these vernaculars we need to expose the cosmopolitan dimensions that connect us to a world that should not remain fully mediated by the nation-​ state or by prevailing neoliberal models of globalization.

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My argument is that what was left out of multiculturalism was the cosmopolitan element, something that draws us into the world via the perspectives (combining languages and histories) of those “minority ethnics.” My contention is that post-​multicultural writers offer a cosmopolitan mediation and translation between the nation-​state and the planetary. World literature at present is still defined by exploring either national literatures or the new realm of internationalist cosmopolitan writings analyzed by B. Ghosh and Schoene, “to call oneself a cosmopolitan involves not so much excising one’s local affiliations, or rounding off one’s personal repertory of identities with a final outer finish, as opening oneself up to a radical unlearning of all definitive modes of identification” (Schoene 2009, 21). One needs also to keep in mind the pragmatic fact that in spite of its founding theorists (e.g., Goethe), when world literature is accessed through English, it augments the idea of English literature in general.12 Schoene’s comment is pertinent here. “Despite its apparent diversity and worldliness English literature still fundamentally serves a ‘mosaic’ of nations [and] renders English literature international, but not necessarily cosmopolitan” (2009, 16). But what do I  mean by finding the cosmopolitan in the vernacular that comes to us from the spaces we used to call multicultural? Much of my analysis involves trying to conceptualize both the one and the many, something Homi Bhabha set out in his distinction between the performative (the many) and the pedagogical (the one) where adding to does not mean adding up. The central argument in this book is that multicultural or ethnic artists (assigned marginalized minoritarian perspectives) provide a “hinge”13 between national cultures and globalization as well as putting those concepts into crisis (in the way that the concept of the hinge does). To put it another way, if we think of national literatures as providing a basis for Ben Anderson’s imagined communities: multicultural writers have always spoken to the nation but have often been heard (if heard at all) as speaking from outside the nation, and not usually on behalf of the global or the transnational. The national anxieties provoked by the foreigner or the guest (captured by terms such as Gastarbeiter) have been represented in many ways. Those who are certified (part of the canon or designated hosts) as contributing to the imagined community speak to the nation for the nation, and do so to the global as well. The question here is how to make the case that these post-​multicultural writers speak for the nation, as a way of bringing about a nation without nationalism, to echo Homi Bhabha on Fanon (1996, 192). The case for including their perspectives is the claim that they provide a more nuanced grammar for cultural legibility within globalization, a sensitivity and reflexivity toward what cannot be taken for granted that is in contrast to nation-​states and their assertions of autonomy vis-​à-​vis the global.14

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Both cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are currently often analyzed in terms of the “everyday,” for example, how people live together (or not) on the street in demotic ways. This approach underpins Paul Gilroy’s concept of “conviviality” (2004). While there are many productive elements in this development, these manifestations of the “glocal” may run the danger of reinforcing the old universalist parochialisms, particularly when they emanate from the former imperial urban centers. On the other hand, the invocation of the everyday does help change analytical perspectives and is often a reminder of the ways in which relations of sociality are more benevolently entertained between individuals than nations. Amitav Ghosh’s short story “The Imam and the Indian” (1985/​2010) illustrates how this functions. Ghosh’s story may be taken as a kind of parable for a cosmopolitan reading in ways that suggest the concept of mise en abyme promulgated by the work of Lucien Dällenbach (1989) where an event within a story may reflexively suggest a framework for its interpretation. The first-​person narrator of Ghosh’s story, named the “Indian doctor” in the tale, juxtaposes two villagers to produce a cautionary tale concerning “false” and “true” cosmopolitanism in ways that ultimately indict his own parochialism. One of these villagers, Khamees the Rat, is an illiterate peasant hungry for news of the world; the other is the Imam who has read widely and has decided that the way ahead is to transform himself into a modern doctor through mastering the Western art of giving injections. The Imam is instantly offended when the Indian ethnographer questions him about his own medical traditions since he was in the process of shedding this heritage and acquiring modernity. “I knew that he would never talk to me about his craft […] because his medicines were as discredited in his own eyes as they were in his clients’ ” (Ghosh 1985/​2010, 4). Within the dynamics of the village, the narrator’s ethnographic quest (linked to the dubious disciplinary project of acquiring knowledge about others) runs parallel with the villagers’ curiosity concerning himself as emissary from another world. Their questioning instantly lands on perceptions of religious difference exacerbated by the non-​translatability between English and Arabic. Interrogated concerning the Hindu practice of cremating the dead, the narrator is stymied by the fact that he does not know the Arabic term for cremation and “I had to use the word ‘burn.’ That was unfortunate, for ‘burn’ was the word for what happened to wood and straw and the eternally damned” (7). In other words, the villagers assume that this cultural practice is due to lack of kindling. Coming to his rescue, Khamees the Rat suggests that it could actually be a cunning ploy to dispose of one’s body so that one need not face the Day of Judgment. Meanwhile, the hostility of the Imam also precipitates the same direct accusation followed by a lecture on how the Indians needed to learn from the “advanced” West who would never burn their dead. When

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the narrator suggests otherwise, the argument escalates in terms of which of their cultures is closer to the West, and this is measured by their capacity for warfare: “So there we were, the Imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West. […] We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West […] the West meant only this—​science and tanks and guns and bombs” (11). In the face of the disconcerting realization that he envies the West, the narrator is given another lesson in ethics by Khamees the Rat, who leads him away from the conflict and comforts him by promising that he will visit, but with a twinkle adds, “But if I die, you must bury me” (12).

Chapter Outlines This book’s seven chapters are organized in the following manner. The first chapter (“Who Counts as Human within (European) Modernity?”) attempts to undo those paralyzing binaries mentioned in the opening:  “West” and “non-​West.” What heuristic value do such categories retain, or is it rather the case that their ubiquity demands they be interrogated further? In some national contexts, multicultural writers are located outside the axis of the “European” and their positioning brings to mind Walter Mignolo’s distinction between anthropos and humanitas: “Border thinking is the thinking of the anthropos who knows that he/​she is anthropos only in the eyes of humanitas, and have to respond from categories of thoughts, memories that are alien to the limited range of the humanitas and the pretense to its universality” (2012, 92). Concepts of modernity are the bedrock of all these debates, the advent of (tyranny of) “modernity” within which “European” subjectivity wanders. Thus we need strategies for showing precisely the localized manifestations of Europe (another version of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s injunction to provincialize Europe). Within neo-​cosmopolitan debates the term West often functions as shorthand for colonial and imperial histories and ideologies, but it is often unclear what or who the term includes, and indeed it is now often implicitly synonymous with the United States. The questions arise: who counts as European, in what periods and what sites, alongside the broader question of what constitutes the human in conjunction with claims to modernity and interiority (in a logic where the primitive is all surfaces)? Testing such claims against outlier figures from the English canon such as Frankenstein’s Creature or Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula acknowledges that they establish certain unexpected accounts of European subjectivity in the nineteenth century. Mary Shelley’s text created a version of European cosmopolitanism within which England, France and Switzerland were to some degree interchangeable, as were Turk and Arab, in a parallel register. The text also demonstrated a degree of tolerance toward

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Islam in ways that are at odds with the current spread of Islamophobia. Count Dracula, on the other hand, was an example of the manner in which the outer reaches of Europe were often perceived as “contaminated” by “oriental” elements (the threatening Mongol hordes as well as Jews, invariably homogenized) that were placed in opposition to ethno-​nationalist models of “purity.” We are still haunted by these allegories, subsequently reclaimed and reworked by diasporic writers in the so-​called new world who cast unexpected illuminations on what it means to be European and who counted as European in varied imagined geographies and temporalities that include the settler colonies. As a contemporary example, Greek-​Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s text Dead Europe is animated by the desire for “Europe” to be dead for post-​multicultural communities because it is associated with toxic legacies of anti-​Semitism, blood feuds, homophobia and so forth—​the yoke of old histories and moribund (but undead) models of familial and social relations. The second chapter (“Vernacular Cosmopolitans”) considers the representational dynamics of “Eastern” Europe in recent writing and contrasts it with depictions of “Asia” and “Eur/​Asia.” Borrowing from Gilroy’s conceptualization of the stranger, I use the threefold structure of: imagining the stranger; imagining oneself as stranger; being interpellated as stranger in the place one calls home. The first half of this chapter examines such contradictory dynamics through recent fictions that mediate European cosmopolitanism in multiple ways that include the central and eastern margins of Europe: Olivia Manning (Balkan Trilogy), Rose Tremain (The Road Home) and Rana Dasgupta (Solo) imagine the stranger; Herta Müller (Land of Green Plums) and Dubravka Ugresic (Nobody’s Home) situate their protagonists as the stranger; Antigone Kefala (Sydney Journals) engages with being interpellated as stranger in the place one considers home. The second half considers an adjacent monolithic term to European, “Asian,” that also needs to be deconstructed to reveal its internal contradictions. As Gayatri Spivak points out in Other Asias, “there is no original unity to the name ‘Asia,’ ” and she describes Asia as a “place of negotiation” (2008, 240), tracing the first European usage of the term to Homer (210). In their anthology titled The Inter-​Asia Cultural Studies Reader, editors Kuan-​Hsing Chen and Chua Beng Huat (based in Taiwan and Singapore, respectively) describe their project as contributing “to the integration of an imagined Asia at the level of knowledge production” (2007, 1)  in which this field escapes from its historical definitions by the West. I explore this dynamic by focusing on the discrepant meanings of “Asian” and associated terms like “Eur/​Asian.” I  draw on the work of several diasporic “Eur/​Asian” artists:  Kyo Maclear, Canadian novelist and cultural theorist; Fiona Tan, international visual artist with associations to Australia, Indonesia and the Netherlands; and Ann Marie Fleming, a Canadian filmmaker and graphic novelist.

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The third chapter (“The Serial Accommodations of Diaspora Writings”) asks how does diaspora fit into the dynamic being mapped here? Diaspora criticism is based on the promise of situating the deceptive stability of nation-​ states in relation to the minor and major migrations that have punctuated recent history. These dynamics have been complicated further by the transformation of the rules of engagement:  before the Second World War, such journeys were often considered one-​way, whereas now one assumes that there will be serial flows between old and new homelands. More recent advances in global communications connect diasporic subjects in unprecedented proximities, but such linkages have also help to sustain old myths and prejudices in relation, for example, to long-​distance nationalisms. Anomaly and ambiguity characterize the diasporic condition, and while many cultural texts examine its complex permutations, they are not always perceived as commenting on here as much as there. Stuart Hall suggests that “the diaspora experience is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity: by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference: by hybridity” (1994, 401–​402). But associating hybridity with diaspora does not dispel the problems raised by its universal application. For instance, is it helpful to speak of diaspora in terms of an already formed body (community or individual) that enters into a relationship with an existing nation-​state? Diaspora is a term often used to mean dispersal and dislocation, but how does diaspora differ from adjacent terms such as transnational, global, multicultural, cosmopolitan and immigrant, and to what effect do these terms enter literary discussions? How do processes of racialization and gendering complicate these issues further? To what extent (and for how long) are writers charged with conveying diasporic histories or representing diasporic communities? While diaspora often evokes a homeland, how do women writers assert, negotiate and contest multiple political ideas of home across time, history and geography? In what ways do women writers accommodate serial diasporas, often in multiple languages? How does one evoke the flickering ectoplasm of another language-​meaning system within the monolingualism of English language writing?15 The terms I have set out in this book suggest that diaspora subjects can occupy the place of either the post-​multicultural writer or the transnational cosmopolitan writer (along the lines suggested by Tim Brennan, B. Ghosh and B. Schoene). The three writers I examine in this chapter are designated “South Asian” and “multicultural” in complex ways:  Anita Rau Badami, Shani Mootoo and Yasmine Gooneratne represent three models of authorship that share differently mediated relationships to India from within the space of Canada and Australia, respectively. The fourth chapter (“Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Claims of Time”) amplifies the suggestion given earlier that at this point in global relations,

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the only groups who, in a sense, could provisionally occupy the universal are those who have been brutally excluded: undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, Indigenous groups. According to Maximilian Forte, Indigenous cosmopolitans “write against hegemonic stories of modernity that suppress coloniality and its production of differences on a planetary scale” (2010, 4) and in the words of Australian Aboriginal writer Kim Scott: “In my heart I’m trying to put myself or Noongar culture at the very centre of things […] white people receiving skin names sometimes react as if they’re really special people. But the giving of those names is really just about fitting white people into the Indigenous scheme of things” (Scott qtd. in Brewster 2012, 237–​243). The chapter invokes planetarity as a perspective that helps estrange one from the familiar, whether in the sense that Gilroy traces in relation to George Orwell and imagining oneself as a stranger in one’s own (imperial) culture, or in the anti-​identitarian sense suggested by Spivak where a perspective outside the globe means that human subjects are regarded as “accidents” rather than as agents (2012, 339). The “planetary” concept also intersects with debates in “post-​humanism,” and the latter have been much influenced by Indigenous cosmologies where rocks and mountains have an agency comparable to (and different from) human subjects. The chapter considers the work of two Australian Aboriginal writers, Kim Scott (That Deadman Dance) and Alexis Wright (Carpentaria), and Canadian Cree writer Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. The fifth chapter (“The Cosmopolitanism in/​ of Language:  English Performativity”) argues that if one language is designated cosmopolitan, then there is already an inherent bias in ways that parallel the debates (pro and contra) regarding the inherent Eurocentrism of the cosmopolitan debates. However, after postcolonialism, there have been many studies suggesting that English has become a complex of englishes that serve the particular requirements of groups who have appropriated and changed it from within. As B. Ghosh puts it, “English is now the insider’s tongue, a distended space of linguistic migration from the global to the local” (2004, 49). Within this phenomenon of global English there is a complex relationship with Englishness and the extent to which animating a language structures one’s subjectivity. Robert Young contends that all Englishness is itself performative (2008, 3) and that it comes into being through the Anglo-​Saxon diaspora: “Englishness was constructed as a translatable identity that could be adopted or appropriated anywhere by anyone who cultivated the right language, looks, and culture” (1). If Englishness is performative, then logic (as distinct from history) dictates that it is not exclusively available to Anglo-​Saxon diasporas, but, arguably, to anyone—​this was the promise held up to the “mimic-​men” of colonialism. Young’s thesis resonates with Gauri Viswanathan’s (1989) important

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contribution to postcolonial studies, that English literature came into being via colonialism—​to form a covert ideological system (unlike overt missionary proselytizing) that would produce those mimic subjects that allowed colonialism to flourish. It echoes as well Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of mimicry: a mimicry of the colonizer that undoes his authority. In other words, the aspiration to take on the “masquerade” of Englishness needs to be available to anyone. However, within global English (clearly a key component within Englishness), the meanings attached to linguistically enunciative positions differ (I speak; I  am spoken), as do the geopolitical positions from which one speaks English.16 How these meanings come into play is explored in this chapter in the context of post-​multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. This chapter examines the ways in which “English” signifies as both an “Asian” and a global language in four recent novels from both China and the Chinese diaspora: Ouyang Yu, The English Class; Wang Gang, English; Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-​English Dictionary for Lovers; Ruyan Xu, The Forgotten Languages of Shanghai. While the last three would be designated “cosmopolitan” writers who offer cultural translations to a globalized readership, the first functions more within the post-​multicultural category I am attempting to establish. Ouyang translates specifically between a Chinese localism and the particular context of an Australian readership. The sixth chapter (“Acoustic Cosmopolitanism: Echoes of Multilingualism”) refers back to the opening arguments suggested in this study, that the inherent dangers of mobility also attach to languages and to the people who speak them. Unlike a global language, when languages become “nomadic” and are untethered from their supposed originating territory, they become associated with non-​assimilable alterity and danger. One recalls the many immigrant stories about being attacked for speaking a language in public other than the authorized one designated by the nation-​state or, on the other side, the particular venom Indigenous languages attract, causing them to be all but eradicated in many settler colonies. While linguistic versatility and difference are accepted to some degree in metropolitan urban centers, indeed may function as a sign of urban cosmopolitanism, they also constitute a hierarchy, and the ways in which this mobility represents a penumbra around processes of belonging and banishment or exclusion remain potent factors in these analyses. Encounters with Derrida taught us that Voice, orality, privileged the authority of “presence,” whereas writing was perceived as a type of second-​order, mediated communication where stable meaning receded even further. In his later work (Monolingualism and the Prosthesis of Origins), Derrida accentuated the fact that the enunciative split means that no one may claim to own language, to fully control its meaning (“the hegemony of the homogeneous”). At the same time that he demonstrated the instability of language and meaning,

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Derrida, an Algerian Jew, confessed to his intolerance of accents in relation to his own French monolingualism. He points out that such accents are not detectable in writing. Building on such explorations, the chapter examines the oral dimensions of multilingualism in Australia. To what extent does this hum or presence of other languages (Indigenous as well as others) fundamentally destabilize the authority that English appears to enjoy within a national culture that perpetuates its colonial monolingualism? To what extent do they merely create “accents” that reinstate a yearning for homogeneous origins? The chapter analyzes Brian Castro’s The Garden Book, Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda and Maxine Béneba Clarke’s short story “The Stilt Fishermen of Kahaluwa.” The final chapter (“Conclusion:  Back to the Future and the Immanent Cosmopolitanism of Post-​Multicultural Writers”) uses the logic of the “post” (from Lyotard) that I  invoked earlier. Referring to some degree to my own coming to “multicultural” consciousness while growing up in Australia, I summarize some of the efforts of writers and scholars in the 1980s and 1990s and beyond to set up an awareness of a “visible absence” in Australian letters. Using as comparison (as I have throughout this book) the much more multilingually diverse cultural terrain in Canada, I argue for the importance of considering how Australian letters become far more materially and transculturally linked to the rest of the world when these other elements are taken into consideration as part of a cosmopolitan reading pedagogy.

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Chapter 1 WHO COUNTS AS HUMAN WITHIN (EUROPEAN) MODERNITY? In the midst of new ideological polarizations, we are struggling to find ways of imagining configurations and legacies that remind us of the everyday hybridity, creolization and métissage of our global relations. In this chapter, I argue for making a case for peripheral cosmopolitanisms in order to complicate a commonsense equation of cosmopolitanism with the elitist practices often associated with phrases such as “citizen of the world.”1 Such webs of cosmopolitan connections are often mediated by and rooted in an inescapably local and even parochial context, beginning with a body disciplined by visceral and affective regimes of foods, languages and familial rites that may include the metaphysical or spiritual (Wise and Velayuthan 2009). I will focus the vast reach of “cosmopolitanism” through the question of who counts as European, offering some examples of how “europeanness” circulates with different meanings in various discourses historically and today. Addressing some of the global meanings of “E/​european” means acknowledging that Europe continues to function as an imperial or colonial metaphor that evokes modernity and civilization, and, in the words of Fernando Coronil, that “the West is often identified with Europe, the United States, us, or with that enigmatic entity, the modern Self ” (1996, 52). Indeed, Neil Lazarus (2002, 44) describes the West succinctly as an ideological category masquerading as a geographical one. When Europe is made synonymous with the “West,” as, for example, in postcolonial discussions, or their neocolonial incarnation in the War on Terror, we need to be much more specific concerning these versions of occidentalism that are often wheeled in to function as convenient binary opposition to equally suspect forms of orientalism. For example, the relatively new entity of the European Union (EU) could be described as an attempt to create a “commonwealth” that transcends or creates an excess to the nation (Balibar 2004, 2007; Buruma and Margalit 2004; Todorov 2005). In its initial expansion, the European Union included those hitherto marginalized as the outer reaches of what was traditionally seen as comprising “Europe,” and thus made legible the hybrid nature of the West and of Europe. This insight in turn

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provokes retroactive reverberations with respect to colonial histories, including those of settler colonies. What did and what does “European” signify in these contexts? What metonymic logic is being invoked here? For instance, Dubravka Ugresic has many sardonic things to say about the marketing impetus that regularly pigeonholes her as a “Croatian” writer and exemplifies in all her work the dimensions of what this chapter attempts to evoke through the term “vernacular cosmopolitanisms” (“Europe, Europe,” 2007, 111–​112).2 In short, my study asks whether the concept of peripheral and vernacular cosmopolitanisms gives us useful tools for teaching the imbrications of the global and the local in our pedagogical enterprises, which include the national, the postnational and the intranational as conduits for acknowledging these wider networks of relations.

Patchwork Selves and Modernity The concept of “the West” as it is used in postcolonial theory […] has no coherent or credible referent. It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one, just as—​in the context of modern Orientalist discourse—​“Islam” is an ideological category masquerading as a religious one. (Lazarus 2002, 44) Considerations of who counts as European often slide into questions of “whiteness,” and critiquing “whiteness” has loomed large over the past few years in North America and, increasingly and differently, in the settler colonies. One of the problems has been that whiteness studies have to some degree contributed to reifying, rather than disaggregating, concepts of the “Western subject” and of what constitutes European/​Western so-​called civilization.3 Attempting to dislodge the apparently “universal epistemological power” of whiteness (Wiegman 1999, 150) benefits from scrutinizing those terms traditionally used to describe the supposed contributions of European/​ Western “civilization”:  cosmopolitanism, rationalism, universalism and so forth. Within this cluster, “cosmopolitanism” has been redeployed by those grappling with the rise of ethnic absolutism and the hardening of nationalisms4 where cosmopolitanism presents a way to rethink globalization in terms of intranational and postnational relations. Critical cosmopolitanism is being used to reconfigure relationships between nationalisms and globalization and to counter the rise of various forms of fundamentalism across the world (Appadurai 1996, 2001; Appiah 2006; Breckenridge et al. 2002; Cheah and Robbins; Derrida 2002; Gilroy 2004, 2005). In the past, terms such as multiculturalism were used to track the complex dimensions of cultural differences, but, in general, because multiculturalism has become associated for too long

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with state management of difference, other terms were sought and cosmopolitanism has emerged as a way to set up new paradigms to counter the bleakness often associated with globalization. One thinks, for example, of Ulrich Beck’s “Cosmopolitan Manifesto” (1998). In the words of Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, “new cosmopolitanism, as an explanatory model of an ever-​evolving global citizenship, needs to engage with the more performative, embodied conceptions of the term as it might apply to peoples, groups, cultures and practices” (2007, 12). In the current global order, who would have predicted that familiar binaries would resurface with such a vengeance and that they would seek their origins in such constitutive old myths of East and West as Islam and Christianity? Accompanying these binaries are claims made on behalf of the “modern self ” as having a privileged access to modernity that includes the moral high ground of being more civilized and more ethical, as disseminating “democracy,” for example, by means of military crusades.5 This version of the “modern self ” also includes the consolidation of “interiority,” that is, of having an interior life (as distinct from a “premodern” self which is apparently all surface). A compelling allegory of that “modern self ” may be located several centuries ago: Dr. Frankenstein’s nameless Creature, man-​made out of recycled body parts provided by those who were not given the opportunity to will or sell their organs for those purposes. In the contemporary warfare of insults and counter-​ insults as to whether one identifies cultures as postcolonial, decolonized or neocolonial, this text bears the imprimatur of Gayatri Spivak’s famous contention that it does not reproduce the axiomatics of imperialism and is not caught up in the reproduction of (European) female individualism (2003, 316). While much has been written about this text, I would like to trace the manner in which it addresses “europeanness” at the beginning of the nineteenth century.6 In what could be described as a posthuman quest for an authorized version of the human, we note that the Creature acquires language by eavesdropping on the refugee, Safie, the “sweet Arabian,” who turns out indeed to be Turkish. The text that teaches the Creature and Safie about history and social relations is Volney’s Ruins of Empire, a telling title catapulting us into the present moment that includes, in the Creature’s summary, a series of racial stereotypes and culminates in “the discovery of the American hemisphere” where both he and she wept “over the fate of its original inhabitants” (Shelley 1969, 119). The Creature acquires language more quickly than Safie (who continues to have an accent since her learning takes root in not quite as virgin a territory as that of the Creature, that is, she already sprouts another language). As in the case of his predecessor Caliban, language generates ontological questions within the Creature: what am I? And hints of its own monstrosity and anomaly, “Was I then a monster?” (Shelley 1969, 120).

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If James Whale’s famous film of the 1930s figured the Creature as an allegory of the working-​class poor during the Depression, it is as easy to see him now in his hovel adjacent to the De Laceys’ cottage as an abjected subaltern excluded from full humanity, even though, according to textual conventions, he manages to speak in the first person. As for Safie, we learn her Christian Arabic mother taught her to seek “independence […] forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet” (Shelley 1969, 124), and she escapes her stereotypically conceived orientalist despotic father by fleeing to generically European territory. Meanwhile, the Creature has learnt to be (or be a simulacrum of) the human—​acquiring language and affect, but unable to parley this into reciprocity: he feels, he weeps, but no one weeps for him. He becomes completely alienated and disaffected and vows revenge on the species. The species can certainly be categorized as humanity, but is not necessarily exclusively European in the sense we would give it today. This reading is designed to illustrate that “Europe” is most usefully grasped as a metaphor (Coronil 1996) in this text. Indeed, it takes some searching to figure out exactly where the events are meant to be taking place or in which language—​the De Laceys speak French, for example, so this is the language the Creature learns, but it appears to be interchangeable with English, as the frame text of Capt. Walton writing to his sister in England makes clear. The difference in this instance is predominantly one of class in that the class inhabited by the author, Mary Shelley, was one where facility in French, German and Italian (and undoubtedly Latin) was assumed. In other words, the “modern self ” of that period aspired to the condition of a cosmopolitan elite defined by its relatively effortless mobility. Arabs, as a generic term that included the Turks, was also clearly a rather fuzzy category. Safie’s father is described as being imprisoned in Paris because “his religion and wealth, rather than the crime alleged against him, had been the cause of his condemnation” (Shelley 1969, 122). The reader is also told that “all Paris was indignant” at the imposition of this sentence. Nonetheless, the state pursues him and ruins the De Laceys for helping him escape. So today’s ferociously escalating opposition coded as Christianity versus Islam is not necessarily recognizable here. Citing the example of this early nineteenth-​century text reveals the historical instability underpinning the “modern self ” and helps emphasize that this concept has never been consistently rooted in a particular nation or language and rested in no fixed understanding of what constituted “europeanness.” In the nineteenth century, a kind of provisional stability resided in class positioning, and this was accessible to “Arabs” also, as exemplified by Safie’s wealthy father. However, the “modern self ” that prevails at present involves incursions into what constitutes (non-​) europeanness (as well as (non-​) whiteness) and the ethical and historical legacies any of these entail. Tracing those histories

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includes consideration of attempts to frame cultural difference through a variety of terms ranging from multiculturalism to transculturalism and cosmopolitanism, the last underpinned by both orientalism and occidentalism. All could be described as subtended by a thematics of contamination that destabilizes all the categories mentioned, something that may be more clearly discerned when analyzed in those settler colonies that comprise the heart of former empires, the ineptly named new world where “hapa” and mixed-​race multiple allegiances guide the auto-​ethnographies of even Indigenous subjects. For example, I have argued that the field of whiteness studies is radically reorganized when Indigeneity is placed as the central signifying difference rather than the black–​white relations constituted by African Americans (Gunew 2007). Like Safie and the Creature, the hapless original inhabitants of the Americas (Native Americans) return much more robustly to these discussions than as mere haunting presences. But how do terms such as European or Western acquire their meanings within specific histories of colonial settlement? Here it helps to touch on an earlier term: multiculturalism.7

“European” as Floating Signifier in the Settler Colonies The central argument in my previous book Haunted Nations (Gunew 2004) is that multiculturalism is a term that acquires very different meanings depending on the local and national contexts and histories within which it circulates. Much the same may be argued in relation to the meaning of “European.” In Australia, the immediate postwar migration was overwhelmingly European in the geographical sense, though it included many who originated from Eastern and Southern Europe rather than what was deemed to be the more desirable recruiting ground of Northern Europe. Indeed Europe-​ in-​diaspora was far from the homogeneous entity so complacently cited in the ideology I encountered as I grew up. As I argued in Haunted Nations, the “Europeans” comprising my parents and others like them were displaced by a version of “Europe” that I was able to identify as British only many decades later, or, more accurately, as Anglo-​Celtic because of a particular colonial history (including a class history) of migration to Australia. This appropriation resulted precisely in excluding what is usually designated as “continental Europe” with its proliferation of languages other than English. In the 1970s, a state policy of multiculturalism appeared to make room for these other histories, cultures and languages that comprise a settler colony. Interestingly, at this juncture we also have the rise in Australia of an attention to Indigeneity. But this version of Indigeneity often amounted to a non-​ Indigenous struggle over who could claim the authority of autochthonous primordialism that functioned to shore up an entitlement to a particular version

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of nationalism. As Benedict Anderson (1983/​1991) reminds us, nationalism is always imagined, and in these settler nations, ethnicities who rendered their ethnicity invisible and foundational dominated over those who were labeled “ethnics.” Recognition that migratory diasporas have cut across many nation-​ state boundaries and that multicultural societies are an empirical reality is acknowledged in most parts of the world.8 But what set apart the multiculturalism of Australia and Canada as settler colonies was that in varying degrees, at least for a time, they incorporated multiculturalism in their descriptions and definitions of the nation. That rhetoric to some degree persuaded and convinced outsiders who did not see the embedding of this multiculturalism in localized meanings. At the same time, multiculturalism as designation was increasingly viewed with some suspicion as tarnished with a history of coming into being as a state apparatus designed to manage (in the sense of containing) varied demographics.9 My previous book explores some of the issues associated with the complex dynamics between postcolonialism and multiculturalism in Australia and Canada and shows them to be at odds with generalizations contained in contemporary analyses emanating, for example, from the United States.10 Indeed, it is clear, for example, that the ways in which the term European is invoked by some US critics hearkens back to and derives its substance from the US register of a white supremacist discourse marshaled against an African American history of slavery (Gordon and Newfield 1996, 86ff.). Broadly speaking, this is intimately tied to the different colonial histories of these settler colonies from that of the United States. One way to clarify these differences is to consider the importance of Indigeneity. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge (1993) make an influential distinction between what they term “complicit and oppositional postcolonialisms” that arises out of debates concerning whether settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada are ethically entitled to call themselves “postcolonial” given their continuing oppression of Indigenous peoples. Mishra and Hodge prefer to reserve the term postcolonial for the struggles of the Indigenous peoples in these countries who continue internal battles against the descendants of settler colonizers, as well as the migratory diasporas that came later.11 In contemporary debates on citizenship and whether Australia will become a republic severing itself from the British monarchy, the grounds on which these debates are conducted are charged with old histories referring back to a specific legacy of colonization.12 What has not perhaps been observed as readily is that Australian multiculturalism itself can be productively analyzed as an idiosyncratic manifestation of (rather than a departure from) this colonial history.13 While analysts outside Australia were persuaded that its description of itself as a multicultural nation was a move designed to erase the claims and histories of the Indigenous peoples (Povinelli 2002), one could also argue

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that recent events in relation to refugees and asylum seekers have revealed the fissures in this rhetoric and demonstrate that there never was any widespread or substantive commitment, even in the 1980s, to this rhetoric of multiculturalism. In Australian discourses, I would maintain, “European” continues to mean Anglo-​Celtic.14

Who Counts as European? In Australian accounts of citizenship and the nation, the structurally aligned “others” are often eclipsed: those multicultural and Indigenous others, who also have an unacknowledged mutual history. Whereas the imbrications of “whiteness” and “Aboriginality” or the issue of “white Aboriginality” (McLean 1998) have been traced in some of their complexities, the history of Indigenous peoples and non-​Anglo-​Celtic settlers has yet to be systematically collected and analyzed.15 There appears to be an interesting battle here around who may lay claim to “our Natives” where debates are conducted in terms of “who gets it right,” that is, who “owns” or is able to legislate concerning the representations of the “Native” (Brown 2003). There is also, fortunately, a productive new line of scholarship that links Indigenous writers and scholars to their own protocols of representation.16 As Avtar Brah points out, nothing is self-​evident about racialization, and different groups are historically differently racialized (1996, 228). In the Canadian context, Roxanne Ng argues that: “While racism today is seen in discriminatory practices directed mainly at coloured people (the Black, South Asian, Native people, for example), skin colour and overt physical differences were not always the criteria for determining racial differences. The racism directed toward the Acadians by the Scots and Irish is no less abhorrent as that encountered by Native people and today’s ethnic and racial minorities” (2008, 207). For instance, Canadian Ukrainians were initially perceived as “black” in the sense that they were not perceived as part of the English–​ French European axis.17 Canadian writer Myrna Kostash contends: “I may be European, but what kind of European? Ukrainians, I  would argue are not European Europeans. We have never had a Renaissance, Reformation or Industrial Revolution. We never spoke French. We didn’t live in cities. (The Jews and the Poles were the Europeans in our midst.) […] So, if you’re going to accuse me of Eurocentricity, you’d better be specific” (1991: 41).18 In Australia, there is a comparable history of seeing Southern and Eastern Europeans as “black” (Gunew 1994), whereas Western (particularly Northern) Europeans were relatively quickly integrated. It continues to be an uphill battle to find these other histories represented and acknowledged as an intrinsic part of Australian culture. What constitutes “white” or “Europe” or the “West”

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in Australia continues to be a fertile field for investigation. Too often in postcolonial critiques, European immigrant groups are homogenized and made synonymous with a naturalized “whiteness” or with various imperialisms. But at the same time, particular nations or groups within Europe had very different histories relating to colonialism and imperialism. However, within the domain of Anglophone postcolonial theory, European and Western in fact often slide directly into English or British. For an Australian example, there is a revealing moment in the collection The Teeth Are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia (Vasta and Castles 1996), when Kalpana Ram, an Australian South Asian academic, suggests the following in her analysis of the term NESB:19 “On the one hand, we have English and English literature celebrated as the language of British and, increasingly, of Western identity. On the other hand, post-​colonial immigrants are fashioned in opposition to knowledge of English” (1996, 140. My emphasis). For postcolonial immigrants like Ram who bear the legacy of a colonial British education, this constitutes one kind of anomaly. For those immigrants who locate their ancestry in European cultures and languages other than English, another kind of absurdity is set up in that “European,” when rendered as synonymous with British, excludes continental Europe. Thus non-​British becomes non-​European and non-​Western.20 Echoes of this occur in Canada also as in Francesco Loriggio’s comment on Southern European immigrants: “Theirs was an ‘imperialism of the powerless,’ ‘of the poor’ […] which had survival as its aim, not the carrying of the White Man’s Burden. The idea of Europe was probably more of an abstraction to them than the idea of America” (1996, 13). And yet, one needs also to bear in mind Canadian writer and critic Dionne Brand’s contention that “whiteness” as a category does have a certain elasticity over time, but only for some: “One can enter not only if one belongs to the so-​called founding nations—​the English and the French—​but also other European nationalities like the Germans or Ukrainians. Its flexibility and its strength allow it to contain inter-​ethnic squabbles […] without rending the basic fabric of white entitlement” (1994, 174).21 From a different perspective located within European Union politics, Stephen Castles speaks of a “growing cultural diversity [that] feeds into a moral panic which portrays ‘Fortress Europe’ as under threat by unpredictable influxes from the East and the South, evoking the ‘Mongol hordes’ of a distant past” (1996, 36). This representation has acquired a new salience, given current refugees attempting to reach safety in the wake of the Syrian war. Hungarian political scientist Lásló Kürti’s study of the contemporary tensions between “western,” “central” and “eastern” Europe reveal it to be a highly ideological project (1997, 31).22 It is this complexity that Dubravka Ugresic captures so well in her collection significantly titled Nobody’s Home. Ugresic’s text illuminates precisely the enunciative positions of those exercising a vernacular

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cosmopolitanism from below. Within Australia, Antigone Kefala’s work resonates in comparable ways (as I will demonstrate). To some degree, both writers echo the exilic contrapuntal stance made famous by Edward Said’s work (1984/​2000). In other words, within Europe itself, cultural and political analysts would not be quite so quick to homogenize “European,” much less see it as British.23 But in British-​identified settler colonies there appears to be a clear tendency to assume a totalizing move where the border is between the British and the rest, not between Europeans (or the West) and the rest. The project of tracing a white supremacist discourse and history in Australia, for example, reinforces the recognition that “whiteness” and “europeanness” are not givens and that the specific historical and colonial dimensions (the differences within) of the term need to be uncovered.24 Within Canada, the foundational split between English and French Canadians complicates such matters differently. Given the presence of the French tradition, it is more difficult to slide from European to English or British equivalence in Canada or, more accurately, one needs to bear in mind that “European” also has a very specific colonial history in Canada, as Himani Bannerji (2000), amongst others, has shown. But to some degree these discussions of cultural difference as being tied to multiculturalism are now also shadowed by debates concerning cosmopolitanism and occidentalism.

Cosmopolitanism and Occidentalism Before 9/​11, there had been an increasing tendency in postcolonial discussions to invoke European or the West as terms aligned with the old imperialisms, outside their own histories and internal divisions (Chakrabarty 2000; Mohanty 1991). It is therefore helpful to encounter Neil Lazarus’s description cited previously. Lazarus suggests that occidentalism is increasingly put in a binary opposition not so much with orientalism as with Islam, which he also describes as an ideological category masquerading as a religious one, something that has become more obvious with the rise of IS (and its affiliates).25 The ideological stakes are those of claiming ‘modernity’ (Lazarus 2002, 45). Lazarus also asks what analytical work terms such as white or west or European do, for example, in the writings of postcolonial critics who are attempting to acknowledge histories and politics outside European imperialisms. His answer is that these terms are often invoked in culturalist forms in such studies and function as fetish to cover over the material histories and mechanisms of specific capitalisms. By operating in this reified culturalist way, they are monumentalized as inescapable frame or system that contaminates “reason,” modernity and so forth. The effect, ironically, is to leave little or no room for agency on the part of the “non-​West.”

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Fernando Coronil’s essay “Beyond Occidentalism” further illuminates the meanings of that particular term. He contends that “Occidentalism […] is thus not the reverse of Orientalism but its condition of possibility” (1996, 53). Coronil suggests the following definitions: Challenging Orientalism […] requires that Occidentalism be unsettled as a style of representation that produces polarized and hierarchical conceptions of the West and its Others and makes them central figures in accounts of global and local histories. […] by “Occidentalism” I refer to the ensemble of representational practices that participate in the productions of the world, which (1) separate the world’s components into bounded units; (2)  disaggregate their relational histories; (3)  turn difference into hierarchy; (4) naturalize these representations; and thus (5) intervene, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of existing asymmetrical power relations. (57) Rather than seeing Occidentalism as incorporating modernity in contrast to Orientalism, Coronil (echoing Edward Said’s (1979) core argument) raises the important point that, indeed, “the West’s preoccupation with alterity can be seen as constitutive of modernity itself ” (78). Speaking to my own frustrations,26 Alistair Bonnett’s very useful overview of the idea of the West is, like Lazarus’s work, partly a response to the way the term is uncritically referred to as self-​explanatory in postcolonial criticism in general. Tracing the term historically, he, like Coronil, sees Western and non-​Western forms of modernity as mutually constitutive (2004, 7). Bonnett examines the links to the highly racialized “white crisis” debates and suggests that “Whilst whiteness can only be mimicked […] ‘Westernness’ can be borrowed and adopted” (27). He also points out that while the term West to some degree removes overt references to forms of racialization, these remain encoded within it (34). Bonnett claims that, “Over the past thirty years, the neo-​liberal appropriation of the idea of the West has introduced an intellectual narrowness to the concept. It has become a very particular model, associated with specific economic practices (such as privatisation, and labour and capital market flexibility) that are globally and militarily enforced” (139). It is against such bleak accounts of globalization that Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) situates his plea for a cosmopolitanism that embraces contamination and fallibility, that is, precisely the opposite of instituting the earlier truth claims associated with European/​Western subjectivity and modernity. As he puts it, “People who complain about the homogeneity produced by globalization often fail to notice that globalization is, equally, a threat to homogeneity. […] We do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogeneous

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system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron” (101–​113). Appiah’s trope of contamination suggests a literary genealogy that (once again) conjures up a fertile Gothic sensibility by connecting us to Dracula and the vampiric revenge of the subaltern margins of Europe, a figurative system that instantly acquires meaning through the contemporary pervasiveness of the HIV/​AIDS epidemic. In these fictional manifestations, Dracula’s past as fearless conqueror of the Turks27 is displaced by his voracious incursions into the heartland of Europe—​as though the very fact that he emigrates to England functions oddly to demonstrate the validity of England’s ambitions to be considered part of the European heartland. Recall that in Bram Stoker’s version, the mediator who catalogs Dracula’s provenance and vulnerability is the Dutchman Van Helsing, a curious mixture of scientific rationalism and folkloric superstition. My exemplary text here is Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe. The title is a telling one and to some degrees works as injunction—​the fervent wish for “Europe” to be dead, in particular to stop being a haunting presence and history in diasporic relations. In this disturbing text, the narrator, a young Greek-​Australian, takes the familiar rite-​of-​passage journey back to the old culture—​Europe in general—​and discovers there a defining anti-​Semitism that he realizes has profoundly shaped his formation in Australia as a queer ethnic male. While on one hand he understands anti-​ Semitism’s corrosive effects, he also finds that he cannot free himself of its continuing legacy, as exemplified in the following extract: In my time in Venice I did not watch the sunset from Harry’s Bar, I did not visit the Guggenheim, I did not have tea at a palazzo or take a ferry to the Lido. I did not feed the pigeons in San Marco’s Square, nor did I travel on a gondola. I did not eat seafood in a restaurant overlooking the Grand Canal, I did not step inside any basilicas or cathedrals. I saw no great paintings by Titian and Tiepolo. Instead, I visited the ghetto and I drank coffee at the Café Beirut. I saw swastikas washed by the rain. And I looked into the wretched face of a despairing man, and saw the ceaseless misery in his eyes, and yes, an eternal exhausting vengeance. The hatred in his eyes was fierce and passionate. They demanded something of me and they promised no forgiveness. I wanted to forget those eyes, to never look into such eyes again. For one deranged, terrified moment—​I promise, only a moment; it passed, I willed it away immediately—​I wished that not one Jew had ever walked on the face of this earth. (Tsiolkas 2005, 158) The narrator morphs into a vengeful vampire with the suggestion that he is a figure of retribution preying on European imperial and colonial guilt,

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but there is increasingly no redeeming quality to his murderous onslaughts except that their excesses exemplify the irrational excesses of the originating European legacy of anti-​Semitism.28 The text is also further complicated by the fact that the narrator is queer, and an unsettling element of homoeroticism characterizes the violence throughout. On one level, Tsiolkas’s story could be seen as a deeply moral allegory, and, indeed, such motives have also been traced by cultural critics analyzing the vampire motif in general (Gelder 1994),29 but on another level the text also exemplifies the horrifying dystopian possibilities that occur when cultural guilt is generationally transmitted and fertilized by the atrocities that characterized the colonization of the so-​called new world.30 Tsiolkas’s novel (and his other work) draws clear links between the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the racist histories the settler colonizers imported and acted out in the new terrain. Nor does Tsiolkas exonerate the later immigrants, for all that they are able to point to their own oppressions and histories of racisms in the settler colony. This novel too is a form of the new critical cosmopolitanism (rewritten from the margins) in which contamination is not necessarily a benign process leading to greater tolerance. Tsiolkas’s vampiric legacy forms a stark contrast to the model of benevolent contamination set up by Appiah in his celebration of cosmopolitanism, a celebration that is somewhat reminiscent of the elitist cosmopolitanism of Mary Shelley’s text. But the “dead Europe” portrayed in Tsiolkas’s novel is also one where the revenge of the East is exacted in the West or the heartland of Europe in ways that recall some of the ideologies associated with Bram Stoker’s novel. Count Dracula buying up real estate and infecting the flower of English womanhood with his poison/​cure bloodline (offering eternal life so long as you become a member of his tribe) is of course easily converted into numerous allegories (e.g., ethnic absolutism). The argument has been made that Irishman Bram Stoker was belatedly indicting Britain’s colonial history where Ireland might be said to figure as Britain’s first colony. Interestingly, that text also invokes a deep-​seated religiosity, as does Tsiolkas’s text—​even though both reference an oppositional domain: the anti-​Christ, damnation and so forth. Dead Europe ends with the protagonist’s mother back in Australia weeping outside the church that had previously been her refuge, as ethnic churches have so long been to members of diasporic communities. Her excommunication occurs because she takes responsibility for importing the prejudices and racisms of the “old country” to the “new”; this means that she was now amongst the damned. Representation of religious difference may or may not be a political ideology masquerading as religion (to echo Neil Lazarus’s terms); what we do know is that religious cosmopolitanism was part of the models functioning at the turn of the past century where the cosmopolitanism of Islam was celebrated

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(e.g., via the Ottoman empire or the Mughals in India) and which in turn fed movements of a pan-​religious nature such as Theosophy (Pollock 2002; Vertovec and Cohen 2000, 15). For those of us schooled in an aggressive secularism, it is particularly terrifying to witness such religious realignments, and we reach rather desperately for reminders that these can coexist with notions of cosmopolitan tolerance (as well as their opposites because we also need to remember that fundamentalisms too have their cosmopolitan dimensions).31 What is at stake in these cosmopolitan debates? In the words of Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, the attempt consists of mapping “a non-​communitarian, post-​identity politics of overlapping interests and heterogeneous or hybrid publics in order to challenge conventional notions of belonging, identity and citizenship” (2000, 1). Vertovec and Cohen offer various categories of meaning for cosmopolitanism: “(a) a socio-​cultural condition; (b) a kind of philosophy or world-​view; (c) a political project towards building transnational institutions; (d) a political project for recognizing multiple identities; (e) an attitudinal or dispositional orientation; and/​or (f) a mode of practice or competence” (9). However, we need to remember that part of the traditional critique of cosmopolitanism includes Tim Brennan’s warning that “it is a discourse of the universal that is inherently local” (2001, 81), and claiming universalism is, of course, always a suspect move. We do well to heed Ernesto Laclau’s suggestion, cited in the introduction, that “If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary contents” (2003, 367). Claiming universalism in the name of a particular culture or group is always an ideological power grab. This claim is another version of the specter of the West identified by Lazarus and others as occluding difference (and therefore agency). It endlessly reproduces white colonial guilt and folds it back into a certain streamlined history of oppression and colonialism that leaves no room for alternative agency. In response, I would suggest that it might be useful to break down the global reach of cosmopolitanism so that it signals its historical contingencies, internal differences and discrepant modernities. For example, in her book Visceral Cosmopolitanism, Mica Nava (2007) looks at the ways in which during the first half of the twentieth century, women consumers in the UK exhibited an everyday cosmopolitanism through their desires for particular goods, as well as in their emotional relations (e.g., with black US soldiers) or in other forms of cross-​racial relations. Her point (and I’m simplifying) is that by gendering received notions of colonialism and orientalism, a cultural anthropologist or historian/​sociologist can produce a different picture of colonial and interracial relations during that period. What I have learnt from Nava is to pay attention to the visceral underpinnings of everyday cosmopolitanism as it functions in global relations now.32

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Chapter 2 VERNACULAR COSMOPOLITANS This chapter examines some cultural texts of cosmopolitanism, those explorations in sociality and hostipitality (Derrida 2002, 156) that juxtapose claims to humanity with the constraints of subaltern abjection and with the caution that imagining the stranger differs from imagining oneself as stranger and from being interpellated as stranger in the place one considers home. The phrase “vernacular cosmopolitanism” sounds like an oxymoron and reflects this contradictory dynamics. In anthropologist Pnina Werbner’s explanation: Vernacular cosmopolitanism […] is at the crux of current debates on cosmopolitanism. These pose the question whether the local, parochial, rooted, culturally specific and demotic may co-​exist with the translocal, transnational, transcendent, elitist, enlightened, universalist and modernist—​whether boundary-​crossing demotic migrations may be compared to the globe trotting travel, sophisticated cultural knowledge and moral world-​view of deracinated intellectuals. (2006, 496) As stated in the introduction, Sheldon Pollock notes the ways in which it references the privileged world of the Greek polis as well as the Roman verna or house-​born slave (2002). Likewise, Homi Bhabha’s invention of the phrase also drew attention to its contradictory nature (2002, 25) and to the idea that it was marked by repetition rather than teleology (1996). It is a dynamics present as well in Paul Gilroy’s tracing of cosmopolitanism back to Montesquieu’s eighteenth-​century satiric text Persian Letters (Gilroy 2005). Because it draws attention to the singular within the plural (Nancy 2000) and to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, the concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism is, I  believe, a useful approach in this transnational, globalized age.1 For example, many current debates on cosmopolitanism revolve around the tendency to view universal human rights as being in tension with the sovereignty of nation-​states, and Immanuel Kant is, for example, invoked on both sides of this argument. In Another Cosmopolitanism, Seyla Benhabib

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argues that Kant’s significance lies not so much in his doctrine of universal hospitality (which never includes rights to citizenship) as in the ways in which his three articles on definitive peace are articulated together (2006, 148). In consequence, “The discourse of hospitality moves from the language of morals to that of juridical rights […] legal cosmopolitanism, according to which the individual is not only a moral being who is a member of a universal moral community but is also a person entitled to a certain status in a world civil society” (149). While Benhabib recognizes the claims of the state and the fact that we act politically from within bounded communities (169), these “state borders and frontiers, require moral justification” (158). Furthermore, when it comes to articulating the “democratic people” in relation to the nation, those who are excluded from the nation (on whose behalf these debates concerning morality occur) are precisely not permitted to participate in legislation concerning human rights. “Citizenship and naturalization are sites where the disjunctions between nationhood and democratic peoplehood become most apparent” (168). From this, her argument is that naturalized European Union citizens should have the same rights as all other European Union citizens (173). In her vision of a “cosmopolitanism to come,” Benhabib reinforces the need for solidarities beyond borders and the recognition of universal rights to hospitality (177). In relation to this last point, it is important to recall that in Derrida’s interpretation, there is recognition that hospitality is always permeated by hostility, hence his neologism: hostipitality (2002, 156).

Allegories of Cosmopolitanism: “Eastern” Europe The subheading deliberately echoes Fredric Jameson’s much-​critiqued essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” where he argues that all so-​called third-​world texts necessarily function as national allegories (1986, 69). In parallel ways, many contemporary texts dealing with Eastern Europe are read as (and to some degree written as) allegories of post-​ Soviet cosmopolitanism in both their utopian and dystopian variants. But what is the meaning of the Eastern Europe of my subtitle? Dubravka Ugresic suggests the following: The problem of orientation in Europe comes from the fantasies of its inhabitants about themselves and others. Tourist guides of dusty rhetoric have tried to convince us that their countries, regions or cities have served through their whole history as a bulwark against the Other; the Other invariably, of course, coming from the East. It turns out that all the inhabitants of Europe would rather see themselves as part of its

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western than its eastern end. To be at its western end gives Europeans the feeling that they are on the right side of life. The other keyword of national fantasies is crossroads. If they have nothing else, at least these peoples, countries and cities experience themselves as being at crucial junctions. The bulwark and the crossroads are the most widely held fantasies of small peoples as they construct a positive image of themselves. (“Europe, Europe,” 2007, 111–​112) Such phantasmatic investments occur both in the center and on the peripheries. So let us begin with some attempts to capture what constitutes “Europe.”

Imagining the Stranger: Olivia Manning, Rose Tremain and Rana Dasgupta Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy was first published in 1960 and explores the adventures of a group of young British cosmopolitans (in the old meaning of a certain class of world traveler) associated with the “soft” diplomacy of the British Council in the Balkans in the early days of the Second World War. Manning skillfully exposes their sense of an entitlement that is undergirded by a firm belief in their own modernity and their access to a civilized subjectivity based on the right to designate others as beyond the pale, in this case, that very territory of the Balkans. Here is a characteristic passage set in Bucharest:  “A peasant had brought a handcart laden with melons into the town and tipped them out at the park gates. […] Repelled by their profusion, she had an odd fancy that, gathered there in a flashing mass of yellow and gold, the melons were not really inert, but hiding a pullulating craftiness that might, if unchecked, one day take over the world” (1974, 63). In her influential study Imaging the Balkans, Maria Todorova has mapped out such “Balkanism” in ways that are homologous to (but different from) Said’s well-​known concept of orientalism. She discerns what she terms a “nesting orientalism” within Balkanism itself, particularly in the nationalist discourses surrounding the demise of the former Yugoslavia. Todorova’s more recent work analyzes the “belatedness” associated with the Balkans that will be familiar to postcolonial theorists. Such tropes are very visible in Olivia Manning’s Balkans, which are peopled by venal aristocrats and primitive peasants, and it is instructive to see how the corruption of Rumania is juxtaposed with the inherent “nobility” of Greece in the final volume (comprising Byronic English Hellenophilism); here the classical portraits of warrior sacrifices remain exemplary reference points for representing the Allied forces in the Second World

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War. In addition, the figure of the “cosmopolitan Jew” makes an interesting and troubling appearance.2 But have such perspectives of the “English ecology of belonging” (Gilroy’s inspired phrase, 2004, 85)  changed in current British writing by those who are imagining the stranger? For example, despite its many moving evocations of what it means to be a stranger in Britain, Rose Tremain’s The Road Home (2008) effectively denies a homeland to the protagonist, Lev, by embedding him in a homogenized terrain. As Neal Ascherson’s perceptive review drily puts it, “there is no such place as Eastern Europe” (2009, 38).3 Lev remains a generic device primarily to expose the text’s real subject, the shallowness and corruption of London. This is how the novel’s logic runs: England is currently a capitalist promised land for economic immigrants from “Eastern Europe” whose recent mobility is ensured by the European Union. Yes they suffer, but eventually they return to their benighted countries and set up entrepreneurial projects that start them down the road to a better life. The “civilizing mission” that haunted colonial texts is also not far away, as in the following passage, where Lev is talking to a compatriot who is also a translator: “What did you say?” said Lev “Oh, just quoting from Hamlet.” “Hamlet is talking to the grave-​maker, yes?” “Yes. Absolutely. Where did you learn that, Lev?” Lev, standing in the sunlight, knew there was a smile on his face. Not only had he recognized the line, but now he felt as if he’d suddenly understood why Lydia had given him the play to read: she wanted to show him that words written long, long ago could travel beside you and help you at moments when you could no longer see the  road. (2008, 313–​314) Clearly Lev’s knowledge of Shakespeare means that he deserves to be helped to clamber out of social abjection. A somewhat unexpected final example is an Indian author writing an English text set in Bulgaria. The protagonist of Rana Dasgupta’s Solo is the 100-​year-​old Ulrich who studied chemistry in Germany and returned to Bulgaria to build the communist dream only to become mired in Todor Zhivkov’s state totalitarianism. Because Ulrich is blind, the text foregrounds acoustic detail—​focusing on this sense gives the novel a promising disorienting dimension. It also paves the way for the second half of the text that moves from rural Bulgaria to New  York. The novel also traces the adventures of a musical genius, Boris, who emerges from the unlikely context of a rural ghost town in Bulgaria to be snapped up by a New York entrepreneur who

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specializes in world music. Eventually Boris’s life converges with those of Khatuna and her bother Irakli, refugees from the Russian mafia in Tbilisi. Boris encounters Ulrich as the latter daydreams that he has found his lost son, whose mother took him to the United States. Ultimately, however, like Tremain’s Lev, Dasgupta’s characters function predominantly to expose the parallel corruptions of the post-​Soviet and capitalist worlds. Dasgupta’s corrupt and amoral New York is a mirror image of Tremain’s London. And his tale relies too much on the stereotypes associated with “Eastern Europe”—​the fabulous folk musicians (leavened by “gypsy” influences), the Russian and local mafia—​rather than dwelling on the small negotiations of everyday sociality that appeared to be its promise in the text’s first half.4

Imagining Oneself as Stranger: Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Müller If Amsterdam was a stage, I had a double role: I was both audience and performer, watcher and watched. (Ugresic 2005, 79) As I’ve mentioned, Dubravka Ugresic is a writer with a compellingly sardonic point of view that serves, among other things, to depict a world that has been pulled away from under her. Her work fiercely satirizes “ostalgia” (Nobody’s Home), in which exiles from Eastern Europe recreate small pockets of their former lives in the midst of the affluent West (2007, 27–​29), but that also depicts the utopian pathos of a Yugoslav elementary school primer that no longer has a state to educate (in the Culture of Lies 1998, 13–​19). This “yugostalgia”5 acquires more sinister connotations in Ugresic’s novel The Ministry of Pain (2005), where a group of characters indulges in a memory game to recover the everyday textures of a former society only to find that its activities catapult the group members into a violence and trauma that require stringent attempts to exorcise the aftermath. At the same time that she recreates with fidelity a world that no longer exists, Ugresic also uses her estranged standpoint to survey the new globalization. Within the European Union the former Yugoslavians find their place as cleaning ladies. The narrator surveys the new stereotypes, noting that “my cosmopolitan countrywomen are known far and wide as excellent housekeepers in EU apartments, houses and public lavatories” (2007, 26). Their newly partitioned countries occupy another set of carefully assigned holding places while they await coveted inclusion into the European Union: “It is no easy matter being a small nation. How does one even know where to begin? That must be why the first thing that occurs to the member is to orientate himself in time. […] And there, just beyond the impenetrable bulwark, you can hear the snorting of horses and the frustrated howls

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of the barbarians trying unsuccessfully to invade from the East” (55). It is also the case that Ugresic could be seen as self-​balkanizing (in ways that others have mapped self-​orientalizing, that is, an internalized abjection): “We are the barbarians. We have no writing; we leave our signatures on the wind: we utter sounds, we signal with our calls, our shouts, our screams, our spit. That is how we mark our territory. Our fingers drum on everything they touch: dustbins, windowpanes, pipes. We drum, therefore we are. […] Our tribe is cursed” (2005, 222–​223). When she is not in her Swiftian register, Ugresic gains pleasure from contemplating the category of hybrid cosmopolitan writer that has been projected onto her. In an essay tellingly titled “What Is European about European Literature?” Ugresic (2007, 163–​176) identifies her favorite confounder of categories and canons: Joydeep Roy Bhattacharaya, who steadfastly writes about Hungary (170–​171). Presciently she suggests that it might be simplest to rearrange geopolitical entities into corporations so that one would refer to oneself as hailing from Ikea or Microsoft (182). Such is the nature of subjects who do not choose their displacement but who can offer signposts concerning the “singular” pedagogical reverberations of their narratives. Herta Müller’s community is an island of German speakers within Rumania. While the community itself was discriminated against, according to her its members maintained a certain class confidence or linguistic aplomb in that they had the reassurance of being part of a major global language.6 This reaction reminds me of my own experience growing up in Australia with German as my mother tongue. While the designation NESB (non-​English-​speaking background) was a primary fault line establishing those who belonged and those who did not enjoy full cultural franchise, the many books my impractical parents brought with them attested to a cultural and linguistic substance that belied the low social currency held at the time by non-​Anglo postwar immigrants—​designated as either laborer or domestic worker (not unlike Ugresic’s cleaning ladies). Like many other displaced persons in the immediate postwar period, my parents were professionals with university training, so we maintained an awareness of cultural capital even though it was not recognized by the national culture at the time, that is, did not correspond to the ways in which they were interpellated. The effect on people like myself was to develop an exilic awareness, whether it be the “contrapuntal awareness” analyzed by Said, the double consciousness of Du Bois’s African Americans, the differently split self of Benvenistean linguistics (énoncé/​énonciation), or that of the Kristevan subject-​in-​process).7 Herta Müller’s essay “Der Fremde Blick” (“The Alien Gaze”) (1999)8 captures this discrepant consciousness very well. In a manner that recalls

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Gilroy’s concept of becoming estranged from one’s own culture, she raises profound questions concerning the ways in which an outsider’s or alien’s perspective is bracingly useful in terms of nurturing an analytical awareness from an early age. In response to those who welcomed her (refreshingly disparate) critical perspectives on Germany (the place of her mother tongue), Müller maintains that she brought this gaze with her from Rumania rather than acquiring it once she arrived in Germany. As a result of being under surveillance by the Rumanian Securitate, she became aware of her everyday domestic reality being displaced in micro ways: “Die Welt baute sich Stück für Stück zusammen gegen den Verstand” (“The world rebuilt itself piece by piece against understanding.”). In another phrase she speaks of “nichtige Dinge mit wichtigen Schatten” (“lowly objects with significant shadows”). And “Fremd ist für mich nicht das Gegenteil von bekannt, sondern das Gegenteil von vertraut” (“Strange to me is not the opposite of known, but the opposite of familiar.”). From this context she develops her own estrangement as pedagogy, learns to put herself under surveillance (1999, 13) and weans herself off the idea that seeing is believing. The “intact” people she subsequently encounters (those without this split consciousness) in her new context recognize her contrariness and consider it inherent, like a character flaw, and that, indeed (as they convince themselves), it probably constitutes the reason she was put under surveillance in the first place. And yet, she argues, the alien gaze has emerged from the familiar things whose taken-​for-​granted aura has been removed (27). The literary territory that we are encountering is familiar from Kafka’s legacy—​among the first to show us the model of the world as an alienating corporation governed by institutionalized surveillance. The split consciousness Müller describes is reminiscent of both Freud’s uncanny where the familiar suddenly becomes monstrous (1919/​1985) and the Lacanian symbolic split when one enters language (1980). However, in Müller’s case this consciousness does not come primarily via the psyche, but from the outside—​from material reality. It consists of the inability to trust the everyday (much less see it as a refuge); there is no stability to anchor even one’s waking conscious moments. This dimension is also explored in Müller’s early novels such as The Land of Green Plums (1998).9 But here already we see a problem with translation. Müller’s German is deceptively simple, but is rendered dense by complex wordplay. As Jean Boase-​Beier suggests, her writing is “semantically complex in proportion to its syntactic simplicity […] By writing in a syntactically reduced way, she places the burden on the reader to supply the feelings, the fears, the interpretation, the complexity. […] This transfer of power to the reader, in a literary playing-​out of the transfer of power between the state and the individual that is at the heart of her politics, would seem a

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crucial effect for the translator to maintain: to lose it is to lose both Müller’s poetics and her politics” (2013, 197). The title in German, Herztier, was not used for the English title and appears to be her invention (Haines and Littler 1998, 21). The ubiquitous Google translator suggests “warm animal,” whereas, literally, it is “heart beast” (used throughout the English translation). Characteristically, Müller refuses to pin down this enigmatic phrase. It can mean a sense of moral compass—​perhaps a type of affective sensation—​but it can also refer to what destroys you (22). In other words, the nuances of what she is playing with are for the most part extremely difficult to translate. The Land of Green Plums deals with a group of dissident friends, three men and a woman (the narrator), who try to maintain their sanity in Ceausescu’s Rumania. Under the surveillance of the sinister Capt. Pjele (complete with dog—​a familiar also named Pjele), who tells each one of them that they are lucky to have him as interrogator, they are all serially undone, even when they have succeeded in escaping the country. In order to communicate with each other, the group develops an elaborate code that includes sending a hair with each letter:  “The word nail-​clippers in a sentence will mean interrogation, said Kurt, shoes will mean a search, a sentence about having a cold will mean you are being followed. After the greeting always an exclamation point, but a comma if your life is in danger” (1998, 81). The rationale for the title is that the trope of green plums functions in ways that parallel the toxic contamination of the surveillance state: “Father says: You can’t eat green plums, their pits are still soft, and you’ll swallow your death. No one can help then—​you just die. The child eats and thinks, This will kill me” (15). Of the four friends, only two survive. The other two ostensibly commit suicide, but it is never clear whether their deaths are in fact due to the long and vengeful reach of Capt. Pjele, even outside the country. As for the two survivors, they are left bereft of any beliefs in the redemptive power of friendship or, indeed, that any hopeful human qualities remain. This too is cosmopolitan allegory, but in its most dystopian form.10 In We, the People of Europe:  Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Etienne Balibar ponders whether the essential function of Europe might be as “interpreter of the world,” drawing on its repository of very diverse intellectuals. Consider the following: “The idea of the vanishing mediator is probably not so different from the idea of the translator, the intermediary, or the traveler that I have associated with the essential function of the intellectual” (2004, 234). It is an attractive thought, and certainly the writers assembled in this chapter are both translators and intellectuals, but are not necessarily recognized for being so, and their pedagogical dimension is often ignored. The last example is another conspicuous case in point.

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Interpellated as Stranger (Imagining Home): Antigone Kefala Born of Greek parents in Rumania, Antigone Kefala has resided in Australia for more than 40 years and made her living as an arts administrator. She has also written in English all this time, but is consistently regarded, like many other non-​Anglo-​Celts, as an eternal foreigner. Here is an extract from her recent book, Sydney Journals, to illustrate the point: The long haul. We are already somewhere near Tashkent, where Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam lived during the war. Food is being served. Across the aisle we smile at each other. “Are you holidaying in Sydney?” she asks. “No, I am going home.” A slight surprise in her face. “Home to Sydney.” When we finally arrive, we fly over the Opera House, the Bridge. I am very pleased. I am pleased with the blueness of the sky. I am pleased as if I had a hand in making the place. (2008, 67) Kefala’s book is divided into 10 sections that comprise aphoristic comments on travels that take place as much in the mind as across different geographies. The dynamic for the book, like all of Kefala’s work, is to transform what her immediate Anglophone Australian readers perceive as an isolated idiolect, characterized repeatedly as those of an “alien,” into a sociolect—​the gift of an erudite sensibility writing to expand the cultural horizons of her compatriots. While Kefala’s voice is indisputably particular, the cultural grammar it invokes should be more familiar in Australia than has, to date, been the case, given the extent of non-​Anglo-​Celtic elements (including many languages other than English) that have long been part of the country. Kefala’s narratorial eye links Australia and Europe in the kinds of affective psycho-​geographies that are only just beginning to be explored.11 The narratorial voice converses with writers, artists, family friends who are part of a continuing dialogue that is completely present and embodied even when they are encountered as part of literary and textual traditions. Thus the Mandelstams, Akhmatova and Seferis populate the text as substantively as friends and family. Just as it is sometimes hard to know whether the meditations and dialogues take place in Australia or Europe, so it is difficult to place them precisely in a temporal sense. The effect is dreamlike

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and, indeed, dreams punctuate the entries and are as viscerally felt as other experiences, a characteristic of all Kefala’s work.12 The resultant palimpsest is both there and here, unsettlingly both familiar and strange with the added dimension of making readers see and feel what we thought we knew, differently—​estrangement as pedagogy. The Europe that inhabits Kefala’s Australia is a melancholic and layered set of densely interlaced interlocutors, aesthetic categories and unsettling artists, very different from the “dead Europe” theme park mordantly conceptualized by Christos Tsiolkas. Citing another passage in Sydney Journal: “it seemed that none of them had heard someone with a different accent for some time. They were listening to me politely, with an increased amount of attention, as if I were an invalid, so that the air became charged while I spoke” (Kefala 2008, 6). Europe is mapped onto Australia, as one would expect, given that there has been a “European” presence (and not just in Anglo-​Celtic terms) for many decades. It also takes the form of being made to feel that she is not entitled to use the language of the country:  “Trying to write, one needs so much confidence in oneself to carry even a sentence. The moment the level goes down one realizes the futility of all things, the thin nature of the enterprise and language that refuses to work” (9). A  Europeanness that is idiosyncratically conceived by all those who are linked to its varied histories is the necessarily differentiated versions produced by vernacular cosmopolitans. In conclusion, another subtly illuminating passage from Kefala’s Sydney Journals: “I realised how environments form us […] all these European landmarks that totally lose their meaning in another culture, personalities we were brought up with, writers that have no resonance at all in this culture, no one knows these things except us, a secret knowledge meaningless to people outside the old culture. And all this illusion of universalities, internationalism” (225). The illusion that one may claim universalities and internationalisms, and have access to this conceptual economy, is currency available to some and not others. Vernacular cosmopolitans have the ability to combine the universal with the minutiae of the local when in the hands of Balibar’s mediating intellectuals—​Müller’s Swabian Germans in Rumania, haunted by the uncanny shards of totalitarianism; Ugresic’s former Yugoslavs scattered across the globe cradling a discarded socialist utopia; Kefala’s “Europeans” at odds with the Anglo-​Celtic models of Europeanness that monopolize Australia’s settler culture. All help construct the estrangement from one’s own culture identified as one of the necessary symptoms or attributes of contemporary cosmopolitanism.

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Eur/​Asian Vernacular Cosmopolitans The globe is not the world. (Pheng Cheah 2008, 30) I have always tried to imagine what the world would look like without this dominating paradigm of East and West, which all too often implies East versus West. […] I also find it ironic that my work as an artist is still pigeonholed, filed away in the post-​colonial box, whilst the idea of the whole debate was to do away with such categorization and the need to categorise at all. (Fiona Tan 2009, 24) These quotations serve to remind us of the metaphors that constrain our imaginings. In ways similar to “Europe,” “Asia” as a concept, metaphor or taxonomic framework has always been both enabling and disabling. This section will explore the somewhat arbitrary nature of such classificatory systems. For example, Gayatri Spivak points out in Other Asias: “there is no original unity to the name ‘Asia.’ […] But what is Asia? Should we train our imagination to allow ‘Asia’ to emerge as a continent? The word ‘Asia’ reflects Europe’s eastward trajectory. It is as impossible to fix the precise moment when ‘Europe’ became a proper name for a real and affective space as it is impossible to fix the moment when a ‘European’ first used the term ‘Asia’ ” (2008, 208–​209).13 As mentioned in the introduction, Kuan-​Hsing Chen and Chua Beng Huat describe their project as contributing “to the integration of an imagined Asia at the level of knowledge production” (2007, 1) in which this imagined field escapes from its historical definitions by the West. In their volume, Sun Ge’s essay “How Does Asia Mean?” begins: “Asia is not only a political concept, but also a cultural concept; it is not only a geographical location, but also a matter of value judgment” (9). Confining himself to the framework of intellectual history in modern Japan, Sun Ge alerts us to the (somewhat controversial) work of philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–​1960),14 who situated mankind in terms of natural contexts, and Asia was classified according to three regions: monsoon, desert and pasture (2007, 19). The dryness of the desert, for example, “naturally” produced the major religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Such a reordering of hermeneutic categories can certainly function to liberate one’s imagination. Another example of arbitrary but generative classification recurs in the critical evaluation of Fiona Tan, one of the artists whose work is explored later in this chapter. On several occasions critics have cited (via Foucault) a short narrative by Borges, who evoked the classificatory system of a mythical “Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided

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into: belonging to the Emperor; embalmed; trained; piglets; sirens; fabulous; stray dogs; included in this classification; trembling like crazy; innumerables; drawn with a very fine camelhair brush; et cetera; just broke the vase; from a distance look like flies” (1984).15 Using this example as a way into the discussion of neo-​cosmopolitanism resonates with Paul Gilroy’s contention cited earlier that cosmopolitanism should include the “cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history” (2004, 75). Invoking race as the way to make visible some of the ruling agendas, Gilroy draws our attention to the fact that “the foundational investment that the West has made in the idea of rights is not itself a neutral or universal gesture” (66). Gilroy prefers what he terms “demotic cosmopolitanism” (75). In a talk given when he was invested as the first recipient of the Treaty of Utrecht Chair, Gilroy drew attention to the ways in which “Racial discourse can be thought of as contributing to a system for making meaning that feeds the tendency to create exceptional spaces and populate them with vulnerable, infra-​human beings” (2009, 24). As discussed previously, I would like to extend this idea to include considerations of “estrangement as pedagogy” since it is precisely something that is cultivated, something one must learn (as distinct from race or even class—​ attributes that are thrust upon one) and it is a feature I discern in the artists and writers I examine in this section: Kyo Maclear, Fiona Tan, Ann Marie Fleming.

Cosmopolitanism and World Literature Just as cosmopolitanism is receiving renewed attention, we note as well the growing interest in redefining the category of world literature, as signaled by the opening quotation from Pheng Cheah’s essay. To situate it more precisely: “The world is a form of relating or being-​with. The globe, on the other hand, the totality produced by processes of globalization, is a bounded object or entity in Mercatorian space. When we say ‘map of the world,’ we really mean ‘map of the globe.’ It is assumed that the spatial diffusion and extensiveness achieved through global media and markets give rise to a sense of belonging to a shared world, when one might argue that such developments lead instead to greater polarization and division of nations and regions. The globe is not the world” (Cheah 2008, 30). Cheah argues in relation to the category of world literature: “In this imaginative process that generates cosmopolitan feeling, we can discern three moments. First, one must sunder the identification of oneself with the world and breach and transcend the limits of this particularistic perspective. Second, one must imagine a universal community includes all existing human beings. Third, one must place oneself within this

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imagined world as a mere member of it, subordinating one’s egoistic interests to that of the whole” (27). What world literature should not become is an adjunct to area studies, as Spivak argues in Death of a Discipline (2003). Bearing these cautions in mind, this section examines some vernacular cosmopolitan cultural texts whose explorations in sociality and hostipitality juxtapose claims to humanity with the constraints of subaltern abjection, with the proviso I mentioned earlier: imagining the stranger differs from imagining oneself as stranger and from being interpellated as stranger in the place one considers home. The concept of abjection underpins some of the discussion. Abjection resides on that borderline that decays into the ambiguous slimy dimension between solid and liquid, between human and inhuman, and meaning and non-​meaning, hence its potency within cultural theory because it overcomes absolute binaries: thus neither/​nor; both/​and. The minute abjection becomes linked with supposedly solid concepts such as the human, language, nation and so forth, it generates a penumbra, including affective anxiety, but this ambiguity may also hold potential for other futures. These dynamics are exacerbated by the ways mobility is conceived.16

Imagining the Stranger: Kyo Maclear Canadian writer Kyo Maclear comes to these discussions via the Writing Thru Race debates in Canada, a landmark event in terms that put cultural appropriation on the map (Miki 2004, 144ff.). Who had the right to tell certain stories when those stories concerned minoritized groups who, arguably, did not as yet have a cultural franchise within the framework of the nation? An unexpected outcome of raising these issues was the generation of a kind of essentialist identitarianism where the work was automatically judged in relation to surmises about the artists’ origins and the extent to which they could claim a kind of racialized genealogy. In her critical study Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-​Nagasaki and the Art of Witness, an analysis of trauma, public mourning and traumatic historical events such as Hiroshima-​Nagasaki and the Holocaust, Maclear (1999) explores visuality in relation to a kind of planetary ethics. What are the responsibilities of those who engage with representations of these events when they tread the line between acknowledgment and appropriation? How do we mourn the losses of unknown others? Judith Butler, via Derrida, has made us aware of what constitutes a grievable life (2004). Maclear reminds us that Freud’s tidily individualized mourning as processing the loss and letting it go cannot account for the different model of mourning required by massive losses in the wake of world wars and technologized contemporary warfare: “Freud’s central characterization

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of mourning as a solitary and interior activity is incomprehensible once we invite consideration of historical trauma” (1999, 130). Increasingly critics suggest that mourning needs to be replaced by melancholia—​not as a psychotic or incomplete state (as in Freud’s account 1917/​1984), but as a process that acknowledges the importance of encrypting or continuing to carry the burden of traumatic events. Like the ancestors, they need to be enshrined in perpetuity and regularly revisited. Maclear, citing Derrida, reminds us that these nameless ghosts need to be serially acknowledged since they “continue to stake claims on the present” (1999, 127). The practice of witnessing, including witnessing at a distance, requires ethical cultivation since it does not come “naturally.” Such pedagogical processes also include the need to not grasp at alibis of previous historical trauma to render one forever immune from complicity. Maclear suggests the concept of “transmemory” where one acknowledges the various kinds of haunting without in any way appropriating their specificities (155). In her novel The Letter Opener (2007), written after her study on witnessing, Maclear turns to the question she asks in the earlier study: how do we make the experiences and memories of others our own? Her protagonist, Naiko, is a hybrid figure, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Anglo-​ Scottish father. We encounter her at a point where her mother, who resides in a home for Japanese Canadians, is entering dementia. The mother increasingly depends on objects as a way of constructing a theatre of memory where things are endowed with the memories that have escaped her mind. Objects circulate as commodities but, as well, as magnets for affect or carriers of affective translation. What appear to be merely objects can become palimpsests of affect; linked to a letter, for example, they carry emotions from one person to another. When interrupted by a third person, they enter the symbolic realm in other ways. The father is absent, as is the sister who has become a journalist wandering the globe as a way of evading familial responsibilities. We encounter Naiko in the Undeliverable Mail Office (formerly the Dead Letter Office), where she works to reunite senders and receivers by means of unmoored objects (letters and things) that have lost their instructions. Naiko speaks to us from the experience of losing not an object, but a person, Andrei, a Rumanian refugee and coworker whom she had befriended and who had suddenly disappeared. Using the skills she had developed in her work, Naiko tells us Andrei’s tale, including the surrounding apparatus of affect that inhabits him and animates his actions. Naiko, as though possessed by Andrei, constructs the world of Rumania under the rule of the dictator Ceausescu—​a plausible account that includes what it meant for Andrei’s Jewish mother to return to her looted house in the village after surviving the Holocaust and what it meant for Andrei, who is gay, to survive in these circumstances. The

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tale is told via letters and photographs and Naiko slips into Andrei as first-​ person narrator, perhaps an ethically dubious sleight-​of-​hand. Arguably, the text’s economy suggests that this process also allows Naiko to come to terms with her own mother’s memories of the Japanese Canadian internment by the Canadian government during World War Two and an understanding of how this experience served to divide her from herself and perhaps lead to the perception of her as a “delinquent” mother. As a way of constructing character, Maclear focuses on objects and every character is given a list of their “things” as a way of identifying their singularity. The effect is that of roaming an immense archive or museum where the experience depends on the viewer being able to animate the objects with the lives of those for whom they function as prostheses—​weathered by their attachment to a life but remaining separate as well and retaining something that exceeds this derivative life.17 Maclear’s approach in the novel is echoed by Fiona Tan in her installation Changeling, where the voice-​over states, “Can I creep into someone else’s skin, behind someone else’s picture?” (2006, 7, 86).

Imagining Oneself as Stranger: Fiona Tan Recalling Etienne Balibar’s concept (cited earlier) of the intellectual as translator and mediator of the world, Fiona Tan fits into the role of both translator and intellectual and uses the motif of travel as a way of exploring both the globe and the possibility of world in the sense Cheah suggests.18 Tan is a self-​consciously hybrid subject (father Chinese and mother Anglo-​Scottish Australian) who was born in Indonesia, growing up in Melbourne, Australia, from the age of two, who has resided in Amsterdam since 1988. Describing herself as a “professional foreigner,” Tan, in her early work, May You Live in Interesting Times, explores her putative Chineseness, which led her to her father’s family village and the recognition that there was no natural home for her there.19 On numerous occasions and as a way of unsettling traditions of anthropological ethnography, Tan has sifted the colonial archives and re-​ presented footage that makes strange the familiar narratives of colonialism—​ including the hierarchy of what constitutes the human. In her work “Facing Forward” (1999), she takes the paradigmatic traveler Marco Polo, and the voice-​over comprises a dialogue with Kubla Khan based on Italo Calvino’s postmodern text Invisible Cities. For example: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he had not known he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places” (Calvino 1974, 28–​29). More recently she uses representations of everyday lives, as in the Vox Populi project,20 where she assembled photographs people sent her in three

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international sites, and plotted a pathway through them. The idea is to use the concept of taxonomy to break open assumptions concerning what we recognize as life, as meaningful existence.21 At the same time she has explored (and the categories of travelers and explorers punctuate her work) a range of archives. As she puts it, “I’ve started to love archives. Looking through an archive is like discovering an unknown continent, a small universe in which the explorer can keep on undertaking new expeditions” (2000, 118). Arguably, her dominant archive comprises Europeanness itself, as exemplified in Provenance, where the tradition of Dutch seventeenth-​century portraiture (tronie, from the Old Dutch word for “face”) undergirds the grammar of the piece. The animated portraits, both static and mobile (static if one considers their slow movements in cinematic terms and mobile if one considers the immobility of the photograph or portrait), are not family photos but do deal with subjects who are known to the artist. So there is a familial connection, but there is also a distance. As she puts it in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, “I prefer images that are free of the baggage of the media, public relations, the film industry and big business” (2007a, 16). The repetitions construct a certain sense of time—​both animation and meditation—​since photos, unlike oil paintings, do not encourage the eye to linger over details (52). Thus her method is in a sense synesthetic in that she projects onto photographs the viewing grammar of an oil painting by means of the mediation of twentieth-​century technology—​the moving camera. As Thomas Elsaesser states, “The Face, the face-​to-​face and the close-​up in cinema were among the first ways of defining the new medium of mechanical reproduction as an art-​form in its own right” (quoted in Tan 2009, 2.21). The notion of provenance also links with the ambiguity surrounding origins; in the antique market, it also indicates a history that confers value, something Tan alludes to in pursuing the history of Dutch portraiture, where those who commissioned such works did so in part as testimony to their social ranking (2007a). Fiona Tan’s video A Lapse of Memory* opens with an abject image—​the burned-​out shell of the old West Pier (Brighton) that hovers into view as though rising from the sea as dawn breaks. It is a shell, but because we see it at a distance and shrouded by mist, we don’t quite realize that, and so when we move to an interior space (actually the Royal Pavilion in Brighton), it is as though we had moved into the spectral and ambiguous space of the Pier—​quintessentially heterotopic in the sense of being physically as well as conceptually present. The opening shot of Henry/​Eng Lie that brings us into the interior also suggests abjection and liminality. From an overhead shot of his fetal body lying on a blanket on the floor the camera moves to a close-​up of his bare feet, whose

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slight twitch indicate a living being. The space surrounding him is also decayed and unkempt. As Henry wakes up, we focalize through his eyes shots of the chinoiserie wallpaper and the dimly lit extravagance of the Royal Pavilion’s dragon chandelier menacingly brooding over the scene. The female voice-​over begins, but initially refers to the opening shot in a time lag because we are already observing Henry doing his warm-​up exercises. The voice-​over subsequently speeds up to describe a scene we have not witnessed as yet. Time and space have been destabilized by disconnecting the visual and the audio (a feature of Tan’s work). The Royal Pavilion in Brighton, an orientalist icon completed in 1822, comprises, as Thomas Elsaesser suggests, “an exploration of Orientalism from its European ‘inside’ ” (2009, 2.30). The protagonist is an old man of dubious background who is described in the following ways, “He feels lost within his various selves, his possible biographies. They trap him in a scenario which he does not want to live. This place can only serve him as a halfway hotel. Henry is waiting for a story he can make his home” (Tan 2007b, 45). He may indeed be an avatar of Marco Polo, stranded in his own orientalist fantasy. The voice-​over situates this figure as sliding into dementia, reminiscent in his repetitions and uncertainties of a Samuel Beckett character. While the baroque orientalist setting suggests being trapped within a particular ideological context, his own embodied rituals faintly echo Asian cultures, such as when he drinks his morning tea or projects some of the gestures of tai chi exercises. The phenomenological elements of his embodied habits possibly point to a corporeal freedom beyond the interior structures and ideologies that have always caged him. Critics suggest that the Royal Pavilion may be an externalized version of Henry’s interior world, a theatre of memory (Doris van Drathen in Tan 2009, 2.09). Within this world he repetitively performs his daily rituals, occasionally pausing as though he has forgotten his script. When not dozing off he reads while wearing double spectacles. The voice-​over gives him a romantic plot saturated with colonial desire in which he fell in love with a woman fragile as porcelain, but “the next morning found her smashed to pieces, a disgrace to the village” (Tan 2007b, 45). The materiality of Tan’s voice-​over is interesting in its own right, carrying the hint of an Australian accent. Tan has described A Lapse of Memory as finishing a sentence begun in May You Live in Interesting Times: “I felt I had left all that—​meaning my post-​colonial roots/​routes—​behind me. But here, all of a sudden, was this building, which refused to go away. It felt like full circle, like a way of completing a sentence. Ten years later, I felt that a conclusive explanation was required of me. And I felt a need for closure” (2009, 1.22). At the end Henry is described enigmatically “Patiently, Henry is waiting for a story which he can make his home. His forgetfulness is perhaps his greatest virtue. His journey is one yet to be taken” (2007b, 45).

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Tan’s installation for the Venice Biennale 2009, titled Disorient*, revisits Marco Polo, this time using extracts from his own journal as voice-​over.22 Referring to the earlier quotation, Tan infuses the work with the anomalies created by the taxonomic eye that is, as we know from postcolonial studies, also a prescriptive eye animated by the civilizing mission that imposes the assessing slide rule of “progress.” The installation involves two screens that use exactly the same audio script but differing visuals. Marco Polo, the quintessential merchant who paved the way for the colonizer, is an emissary from Venice, a city that, like the Western Pier, is an ambiguous entity where it is difficult to distinguish between land and water. Watching the two screens simultaneously as one is meant to do, a powerful dynamic is set up between them, but not, as Tan tells us, “a simple dialectical juxtaposition of rich and poor, positive and negative” (2009, 1.27). In the first screen, the dim lighting makes it hard to distinguish individual objects. The camera pans across shelves of stuff, including an old television set and other clearly modern artifacts. We view a stuffed (dried out) elephant in Screen #1 just after we see a living one walking in Screen #2. As well, we observe a monitor showing silent archival footage of apparently Chinese men boating along a canal. Somewhere, a screen or fabric with kangaroos is inserted. The collection is reminiscent of the indiscriminate Victorian cabinet of curiosities—​collecting with no clear rationale (these days we might call it hoarding, and the parallels are worth investigating), and this contrasts with the self-​confidence of the male voice-​ over from Marco Polo’s journals. Screen #2 depicts footage of the places mentioned in Marco Polo’s journal in their modern incarnation, for example, there is footage of Baghdad during the war with US occupying forces.23 Footage includes a man being hooded and led off, presumably to be executed, while his distressed wife and children are slumped against a wall. People look directly into the camera, conveying no clear affect. The net effect is to render the Marco Polo voice-​over ludicrous in its confident taxonomizing, for example, when Marco Polo speaks of great wealth and how all the inhabitants wear silk, we see modern footage of people laboring in terrible conditions (shoveling at mountains of white powder with inadequate protection) or evidence of pollution when he describes the ideal scenery the traveler encounters. Tan’s work has received renewed attention in response to the European crisis in migration and multiculturalism. As Jacqueline Lo suggests, “Tan’s artworks can be read as acts of citizenship that engage with archives in ways that offer new insights into contemporary notions of subaltern Agency” (2014, 59).

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Interpellated as Stranger (Imagining Home): Ann Marie Fleming Fleming’s The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, as both film and graphic novel, explores the legacy of her “cosmopolitan” (in the earlier sense of the word) grandfather, a world-​ famous magician born in China who married an Austrian and took his vaudeville troupe all over the world between the two world wars.24 Playing with the conventions of the auto-​ethnographic documentary, Fleming punctuates the stock repertoire of photographs and movie footage with devices from her life as an animation artist, thus undermining the veracity of or assumptions concerning the supposed truths of visuality (as explored in Maclear). Fleming’s graphic novel describes her great-​ grandfather in terms of the older meanings of cosmopolitanism: “Now, we are not a very Chinesey family, and the only pictures I had ever seen of Long Tack Sam were of him in Western clothes. I thought of him as my great-​ grandfather, not as a particularly ‘Chinese Guy.’ ‘Cosmopolitan,’ I  guess you’d call it. A  citizen of the world. He was very short and carried a big cigar” (2007, 9). In keeping with this image, Long Tack Sam appears to have no difficulties with border crossing in ways that are at odds with the experiences of Fleming herself when she attempts to follow in his footsteps (74–​77). Her difficulties culminate in her not being permitted to visit the “ancestral village” when she is only a taxi ride away (73). This differs from the parallel experience Fiona Tan traces in May You Live in Interesting Times. Fleming compensates for this inability to arrive at the originary place by finding fragments of Long Tack Sam all over the world—​whether it be the stage backdrops deposited in Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology or handbills in New Zealand (53). The sheer logistics of these feats of travel are a continuing source of wonder. With characteristic humor, Fleming inserts a number of “origin” stories for her ancestor, derived from the various versions she encounters when interviewing family members scattered across the globe.25 At the same time, the account is permeated by her sense of pathos that this history, which she describes as a ghostly network of connections, has been permitted to fall into decay. The rhizomatic family web does not mean that its inhabitants actually talk to each other. In the final pages of the graphic novel Fleming muses: And now that I know what a big life he had, I’m left with the question, “Why was he forgotten?” I think he was forgotten in the West because of the death of vaudeville. Because he didn’t go into the movies. Because he was Chinese. But he was also forgotten in China, perhaps, ultimately, because he did not make it his home.

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But what puzzles me is why he was forgotten by his own family. (Okay, we did celebrate his birthday, his death day and his anniversary, in good Chinese style—​while granny was still alive—​but we knew nothing about his accomplishments). (156–​157) The Second World War effectively curtailed Sam’s mobility, and he had foreclosed on the possibilities of entering the movies because he objected to the ways in which Chinese characters were being portrayed (113). Once again we note that these vernacular cosmopolitans have the ability to combine the universal with the minutiae of the local—​Maclear’s imagined Rumanians who help interpret more immediate histories of Canadian internments; Fleming’s Asian, European and Eur/​Asian ancestors confounding historical prescriptions of identity and Tan’s work situating European aesthetic legacies as the exotic other. All help construct the estrangement from one’s own culture identified as one of the necessary symptoms or attributes of the new cosmopolitanism. Such perspectives are not majoritarian, not the god’s-​ eye view of the old cosmopolitanism, but instead comprise the stammering pedagogies, the minoritarian interjections that disrupt the business as usual of certain forms of globalization.

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Chapter 3 THE SERIAL ACCOMMODATIONS OF DIASPORA WRITINGS “Remember, it’s an in-​between space. Neither here nor there. It is dangerous.” (Badami 2006, 110) Always becoming, will never be Always arriving, must never land Between back home and home unfathomable, is me—​ By definition: immigrant (Mootoo 2001, “Mantra for Migrants”) “And now,” Tsunami went on, “what about Sinhala being declared the official language? Isn’t that discrimination against everyone who doesn’t speak and write Sinhala? Tamils? Muslims? Burghers—​everyone who communicates in English. When you practise wholesale discrimination against people, the result is war.” (Gooneratne 2006, The Sweet and Simple Kind, 312)

The Dubious Consolations of Diaspora Criticism As stated in the introduction, diaspora criticism has changed from the days when migration meant that one stayed put. Now that return journeys are part of the pattern, the dynamics of belonging have changed between diasporic groups, individuals and nation-​states. Questions remain concerning the extent and duration to which writers are pressured to convey diasporic histories or represent diasporic communities, as well as how these demands affect women in particular. As well, without invoking the full range of complexities associated with the Sapir-​Whorf theory,1 how does one convey another language-​ meaning system within the monolingualism of English-​language writing? While this chapter cannot provide definitive answers to such questions, they do animate the analyses of the writers discussed here. To support the contention that diaspora criticism needs to be anchored in temporal and spatial specificities, this chapter will focus on three diasporic women writers who are linked by being “South Asian” in complex ways. Anita Rau Badami was born

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in India in 1961 and immigrated to Canada in 1991. She has published four novels: Tamarind Mem (1996), The Hero’s Walk (2001), Can You Hear the Night Bird Call? (2006) and Tell It to the Trees (2011). Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland in 1958, was raised in Trinidad and moved to Canada in 1977. She began her career as a painter and video maker and published her first collection of short stories, Out on Main Street, in 1993. Her first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, was published in 1993 and a book of poems, The Predicament of Or, in 2002. Her second novel, He Drown She in the Sea, appeared in 2005, her third novel, Valmiki’s Daughter, in 2008 and her fourth novel, Moving Forwards Sideways like a Crab, in 2014. Yasmine Gooneratne immigrated to Australia from Sri Lanka in 1972, holds a personal chair at Macquarie University and has recently returned to live in Sri Lanka. Her most recent novel, The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006), was short-​listed for the Dublin Impac Prize. Previous novels include A Change of Skies (1991) and The Pleasures of Conquest (1996). This chapter begins by discussing general theories comprising diaspora criticism linking these, when appropriate, to the chosen texts, before moving into a detailed analysis.

Resident Aliens: Diasporic Women’s Writing Diasporic subjects are often used to represent deviations from the supposedly “pure” and “rooted” characteristics of national citizens. Instead they function to indicate the instabilities of hybridity, métissage, creolization and “contamination,” elements that have also defined the condition of (post) modernity more generally. For example, in Badami’s third novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, the semi-​divine King Trishanku hanging between heaven and earth is a compelling illustration of a tragic, or at least traumatic, state of un-​belonging (2006, 76–​77). National narratives tend to tether such diasporic figures to tragic teleologies to make them useful cautionary examples, but diasporan subjects themselves often find their condition to be enabling, lifting them above the emotional turmoil or constraints associated with myths of nationalism to a hyper-​rationalist dimension. For instance, writing about the process of constructing her memoirs of growing up in Hong Kong and of being trained as an academic in Canada, Maria Ng celebrates the ways in which she acquired a critical consciousness that helped her to remain impervious to the affective modalities of home and family with their various forms of engulfment: “My western education has inculcated in me, from the very first class exercise in explication and the first analytical convent-​school essay, the habit of looking at people and situations objectively, even if they might be one’s relations and the situations are personal ones” (2008, 37). As cited in the previous chapter, both statements are reminiscent of W. E. B. Du Bois’s much-​cited notion of “double consciousness,”2 as well as Edward Said’s influential concept of “contrapuntal

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consciousness:”3 both approaches construct a self-​conscious observer, or witness, in a tangential relationship to affective nationalism. In other words, such dual or multiple perspectives can be usefully at odds with nationalist models of thinking and dwelling. Recognizing that there is more than one language or more than one recipe for social interaction means that one can more easily be critical of all those entities that speak in universal terms in relation to civilizations or nations or even family dynamics. However, much depends on the degree to which one’s baggage includes a secure cultural capital when one migrates—​dependent on one’s class, one’s age and so forth.4 Otherwise the diasporic state is too often fraught with those apparently inescapable abjective dimensions catalogued by critics such as Rey Chow in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002). In these formulations the abjective state is always minoritarian, liminal and eternally plaintive. Contemporary diaspora studies was firmly established with the journal Diaspora (1991), edited by Khachig Tölölyan, in which William Safran made a case5 for the defining models of the Jewish, Armenian and Greek diasporas, maintaining that diaspora studies’ heuristic value depends on excluding groups he describes as simply of minority status or those who merely travel. These earlier models privileged the binary of homeland and hostland, and critics such as Robin Cohen (1997) subsequently attempted to move beyond this oversimplified opposition by constructing taxonomies focused on victim, labor, trade and colonial diasporas as providing a more complex and realistic structure for identifying the mobilities and dynamics of diasporic groups. But Cohen has been critiqued for his inability to abandon the reified mechanisms associated with the ethnic affiliations of those early models.6 More recent theorists evoke the serial diasporas (movements across borders and within them) of groups and individuals:  James Clifford 1997; Vijay Mishra 2007; Sudesh Mishra 2006; R. Radhakrishnan 1996). Questions raised have included whether diaspora studies now includes all forms of transnational mobility (“routes”) or whether the category should be reserved for “rooted” local groups or individuals, particularly those held together by an identifiable historical trauma—​the current Syrian war being a salient example.7 Embedded within these analyses is the question of how temporal concerns (histories and alternate temporalities8) interact with spatial considerations and, indeed, whether oppression and trauma are inescapable defining elements. Avtar Brah, for example, is more concerned with the “homing desire” that animates diasporic consciousness and that she distinguishes from a desire for a homeland: I argue that the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire which is not the same thing as desire for a “homeland.” This distinction is important, not

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least because not all diasporas sustain an ideology of “return.” In examining the subtext of “home” which the concept of diaspora embodies, I analyse the problematic of the “indigene” subject position and its precarious relationship to “nativist” discourses. (1996, 180) One could also argue that diaspora studies has become the default term for a phenomenon that has been around for decades, or perhaps centuries:  how to identify, situate and conceptualize the impact of those who join a group as visitors or guests, for example, the immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers who seek to enter nation-​states and who may sometimes become citizens. While it is always dangerous to treat groups as though they were individuals, how the hostland interpellates such guests is often evaluated as a measure of a culture’s self-​confidence and even civilization. Indeed, the Althusserian idea of interpellation, or being hailed into being, has proved useful for analyzing these relations.9 As indicated, while diaspora studies builds on earlier work such as multicultural studies and intersects with postcolonial studies, recent cultural critics have attempted to differentiate the field from the areas mentioned and to situate these endeavors within newer ones such as globalization and transnational studies.10 As the quotation from Brah indicates, concepts of “home” are at the heart of these debates, and one must question whether there is always an imperative to return to some putative nostalgically invested motherland or whether such longings may be more immediately a consequence of the sense of un-​homeliness (e.g., due to racism) accompanying even a prolonged residence in the new country. In my own research, these neat models disintegrate when one is grappling with the affective economies of generational transmission where even third-​generation artists and writers are still being designated “migrant” or “ethnic.”11 As I asked in earlier work examining the dynamics of multiculturalism in settler colonies such as Australia, who exactly is entitled to choreograph and hail into being a national culture? Who is included in a national cultural franchise? Who is on whose margins (as I asked many years ago)?12 Many of us found ourselves arguing against nationalist models of homogeneous cultures and an abundance of narratives concerning origins that in settler colonies often accompanied the erasure or appropriation of Indigenous cultures. In some ways this work was easier to do in settler colonies because among those marginalized and rendered homologous with “foreigners” were Indigenous groups, thus exposing (as Brah suggests) the contradictions and fault lines within such foundational models. Indigenous groups base their claims on an autochthonous relationship to place—​they have always been there and their political strategies are based on designating all other groups as immigrants, settlers and colonizers. Hence they profoundly unsettle postcolonial myths of nationalism.13

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Diaspora studies are certainly not meant to reinforce the binaries of home and away or a naturalized belonging and un-​belonging, as though those designated diasporic were somehow being automatically constructed as eternally aspiring to full cultural citizenship. Such critical approaches are most useful when they suggest that those writers who find themselves situated or qualified through hyphens and other devices not of their choosing are caught up in the insecurities of those who are generating these terms of engagement. As indicated, such interpretations of dwelling and reciprocal relations affect women in specific ways, although the three writers examined are situated very differently in terms of generation, class and sexual politics. In general etymological terms, diaspora is connected with notions of seeding and dissemination. When specific writers take up this generalized image, the implications are multiple and complex. Consider the following passage in Badami’s text: “Without history you were nothing, a nobody, one of those fluffy seed-​heads floating in the summer breeze, unaware of your origins, careless of your destination. Meaningless, mythless, shapeless” (2006, 206). The dual movement in this image raises a number of issues. First, it is a subtle reminder that Badami’s text engages throughout with the clichés of Canadian state multiculturalism and at the same time shows the comparably limited ways in which diasporic subjects occasionally respond.14 Indeed, one could argue that Badami’s entire text knowingly illustrates the perils of diasporic imaginative investments in homeland, hostland and those diasporic subjects caught between them. In this instance the image evoked focuses on the centrifugal question of what holds people together in an imagined diaspora. The image is also a reminder that diaspora is fantasized as much by the nation as those internal to it and in this version spawns those anxieties that quickly turn diasporic individuals and groups into targets: an example is the Tamils in Sri Lanka, as explored in Gooneratne’s text (2006). The nation is provoked by the perception that diasporic groups are bound together by alternative relations to those associated with a “local” nationalism. Vijay Mishra discusses this hostility to manifestations of other allegiances in terms of a Hegelian and Zizekian “Nation Thing” in which the nation is paradoxically both fantasized and material (2007, 14–​15), whereas Ghassan Hage compares it to the imaginary unconditional love a mother has for her child (2003, 36–​43): both models are of course fantasy structures. Hage’s formulation also implies the centrality of gender and raises the issue of whether women and men are perceived to carry differing responsibilities in maintaining cultural links. Women are often construed as the bearers of tradition, more emphatically so when in transition.15 Psychoanalysis and its structures of mourning and melancholia offer further frameworks of meaning,16 as does the burgeoning field of affect theory.17 Certainly psychoanalytically inspired studies suggest that the

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children of diasporic peoples often inherit disabling guilt and longings from their parents.18 Suffice it to say that while the diasporic subject exists (like all subjects) in a permanent state of misrecognition in the mirror of the social, it simultaneously functions as an enduring symbol for the nation-​state because this misrecognition is, in a sense, inescapable. It is another way of formulating the instability that exists at the core of national cultures or any cultures aspiring to absolute homogeneity. Homi Bhabha’s well-​known concept of mimicry, outlined in The Location of Culture (1994, 85–​92), is another version of the ways in which this logic functions. In other words, in Bhabha’s instance, the impulse toward assimilation embodied in mimicry is precisely the mechanism that undoes the claims of colonial authority. In that case, should we not distinguish among the functions the diasporic subject performs for the nation, for the putative home culture and for the so-​called diaspora itself ? As stated at the beginning, when are diasporic writers relieved of the burden of representing their supposed community? And how does all this influence the ways in which we read texts; for example, do we reinforce the binaries, the reifications, where texts stand in for diasporic subjects who are designated to be at a tangent to a supposedly unified culture? Indeed, they can be seen to testify by their apparently diasporic nature (disparate groups and individuals struggling to get in) to the very existence of such a unified culture. The consequences are both symbolic and material in ways that return us to Althusser and his concept of ideology—​people’s imagined relations to their real conditions (1984, 38–​39). In addition, the ideology of the imagined nation carries material consequences in terms of whose work gets funded and published and who gets taught as part of a national culture. Folded into these issues are questions concerning those who are designated expatriate members of the “home” culture, functioning as a kind of “outreach” for it—​a further marker of underlying ideological assumptions concerning certified belonging.19 Adjacent to the slightly problematic notion of Althusserian “hailing into being” is the Lacanian mechanism of the mirror stage (Lacan 1980), in which the subject comes into being at the same time as becoming split.20 While the misrecognition inherent in the Lacanian mirror stage is described as occurring at an unconscious level, it does lead to further speculations concerning the degrees of consciousness involved, particularly when the Lacanian emphasis on the unconscious being structured like a language conjures up notions of a particular language. A suggestion I would like to make is that interpellation involving a misrecognition (we are not hailed in ways to which we assent) brings into consciousness a further layer of self-​consciousness or reflexivity. Caught in the baleful and paralyzing glare of the stereotype (social misrecognition), the subject-​in-​process summons into being a reflexivity that undermines such

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structures through a number of different tactics (Mootoo’s appropriation of Bollywood, discussed later, is one such example). If marginalization (arguing for difference) is invariably constructed as permitting the subject to be subjugated through taking up the position of what Rey Chow has termed “ethnic abjection” (2002, 128–​152), there does not appear to be any room left for agency. However, as some have suggested, ethnic abjection can also function as a tool for agency, even if this is restricted to being simply a spanner in the workings of the state.21 Arguably, the stereotypes of ethnic abjection emanating from the host culture call into being an active set of tactics to undermine and construct alternatives to this abjected field. For example, there are the nomadic subjectivities celebrated in the work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti: Comparing diasporas raises ethical questions about the methods of laying alongside each other different forms of traumatic dispersal. Faced with a proliferation of such discourses and social practices of nomadism, how can we tell the proactive from the regressive ones? The counter-​ method starts from the politics of locations. […] This politics of locations is best served by a non-​unitary vision of the subject that stresses nomadic complexity and open-​endedness […] far from resulting in moral relativism, non-​unitary subject positions engender alternative systems of values and specific forms of accountability. (Braidotti 2006, 92–​93)

Politics of Location: Here as Much as There I chose Anita Rau Badami, Shani Mootoo and Yasmine Gooneratne as women writers working with diasporic perspectives who also represent three models of authorship that share differently mediated relationships to India, though in the case of Gooneratne (in Sri Lanka), this takes a somewhat spectral form. While Gooneratne is a diasporic writer who returns to her homeland, Badami and Mootoo to some degree represent a mixture of both the old and new diasporas identified by Vijay Mishra (2007, 2–​4). In her study of a diasporic community in Vancouver, Badami weaves together the ways in which these networks intertwine locally, nationally and transnationally. Using specific historical events, Badami explores their local impact on individuals in India and Canada. Mootoo, on the other hand, excavates the anxieties that come with serial migrations—​Caribbean Indians, for example, are perceived as inauthentic Indians, particularly within the welter of anxieties that bedevil diasporic communities. Her work is complicated further by the disidentifications associated with Queer agendas.22 All three writers anchor their meditations in the sensorium—​the manner in which particular ways

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of being are embodied—​scripted in and on bodies. For example, there are many instances of the traditional nostalgias associated with cuisine or, more unexpectedly, the barely noticeable smell of lavender soap that poignantly binds together an aunt and her lost (and subsequently recovered) niece in Badami’s 2006 novel. Badami’s text begins in India in the late 1920s and focuses mostly on the two turbulent decades of the late 1960s to the 1980s, concentrating on events in the Punjab and thereby giving historical and affective insights into the large Canadian Sikh community. The plot needs to be summarized because the events and characters draw attention to the differing complexities of diasporic ties, including their political nuances. It is a testament to Badami’s strength as a writer that her characters transcend their allegorical functions. The novel concentrates on two sisters: Kanwar, who remains in India, and Sharanjeet Kaur, who emigrates to Vancouver after “stealing” the husband meant for her older sister. The older sister, Kanwar, is consumed in the violence surrounding Partition, and the novel takes up the family thread with her surviving daughter, Nimmo.23 It takes Sharanjeet (by now known as Bibi-​ji) many years to relocate her niece and involves her friendship with Leela Bhat, a “half-​and-​half,” or Eurasian, who also ends up in Vancouver. It is Leela who precipitates the telling story of the novel’s presiding spirit, King Trishanku, who was condemned to hang between heaven and earth in his own version of “heaven” (76–​77). As her somewhat malevolent grandmother informs her, “And so when somebody is neither here nor there we say they have attained Trishanku’s heaven, not a very pleasant state of being at all!” (77). While Leela to some degree turns the tables on these oppressive relations by facilitating her white mother’s death and subsequently taking over the reins of the family household, her new husband, Balu, wishes nothing better than to escape from the responsibilities bequeathed by his ancestors (96). Hence he leaps at the opportunity to emigrate to Canada and to take up a somewhat insecure position of sessional teaching at a community college. In Vancouver, they become the tenants of Bibi-​ji and her husband, who have meanwhile become pillars of the community and whose Delhi Junction Café on Main Street, Vancouver, functions as the informal heart of the growing South Asian diaspora there. It is here that the events taking place in India are mulled over and assigned specific affective freight for the diaspora. These events include Indira Gandhi’s emergency measures, the assault on the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. More than 30 years later the consequences of the last are still weaving their way through the Canadian courts. Haunted viscerally by the perils of being in between, Leela had worked hard to establish herself within the community in Bangalore. In Vancouver,

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she immediately feels a stranger, who is forced to consult maps in order to navigate the city. Bibi-​ji, however, reminds her that Canada is a country filled with in-​between minorities, and Leela resigns herself to the fact that “she was a Minority lumped together with an assortment of other minorities. All in-​ between people” (137). She works hard, however, to establish a temporary home on the new soil: Her nose wrinkled slightly at the smell of cleaning fluid and floor polish. She would have to light some incense sticks as soon as possible; that way it would smell more like Home. She would hang up her pictures, she would set up her gods. She would cut this New World into the shape she wished it to be, pull at the edges that didn’t match the pattern of her memories and rename it. She would redraw maps and mythologies like the settlers who came before her, those men and women from Europe who had taken a land already scored by earlier populations and marked with their own symbols and meanings, owned it with their namings and words. Like them, she would make this corner of the world her own until it was time to return home. (111) In the meantime, Bibi-​ji, a successful matriarch, but childless, rediscovers her lost niece, Nimmo, in Delhi and seizes the opportunity to cement this relationship by offering financial help. But she also exacts a toll in requesting that Nimmo relinquish her eldest son, Jasbeer, into her care to be brought up in Canada. There Jasbeer comes under the spell of the encyclopedic The Popular and True History of the Sikh Diaspora being accumulated by his uncle Pa-​ji (200), a history that is invented (like most traditions) in terms of its family figures and so-​called portraits that are randomly accumulated from various junk stores (202). Jasbeer’s persistent difficulties with fitting in at school result in one of the novel’s satiric highlights in the encounter between Sharan and Kushwant Singh and the school headmaster where mutual misunderstanding and cultural stereotyping proliferate. The Singhs are summoned because Jasbeer has taken a knife to school: The principal tried again. “I understand that in your part of the world it is okay to carry swords, but—​” “Our part of the world?” interrupted Bibi-​ji. “No, there you have made a mistake, Mr. Longman.” “Longbottom,” the principal corrected her. “Mr. Longbottom. On Main Street we are very law-​abiding citizens. Nobody carries weapons. Only religious leaders are permitted to carry the kirpan, and baptized Sikhs. Of course for children it is not allowed.”

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“No, Mrs. Singh. I  don’t mean Main Street.” The principal sounded weary. (209) Jasbeer becomes entwined in the network to establish an independent Sikh state (Khalistan), for which there was vigorous recruiting in the diaspora. The example of Jasbeer points to the ways in which old myths and allegiances are kept alive in diasporic communities—​exacerbated by the racism they encounter in the larger nation. Badami’s character Pa-​ji functions as a voice of moderation as the community is rent asunder by these events and the Café collapses as a communal meeting point for expressing robustly divergent opinions. Following the events in Amritsar in which the Singhs are caught up during a visit to the Golden Temple and her husband is shot, even Bibi-​ji joins the demonstrations for Khalistan. She also neglects to warn her friend Leela, who is finally visiting India, against booking on Air India, even though rumors that it was being targeted were rife within the community. Leela finally meets her destiny between earth and sky when she becomes one of the 329 victims of that disaster. As Badami explains in the notes included with the novel, one of her neighbors had been a victim.24 The trauma that touched many families in the diaspora had been heightened by the fact that the prime minister of Canada had sent a note of condolence to Rajiv Gandhi in relation to the death of “Indian” rather than Canadian citizens (396). This testament to “un-​belonging” links up in the novel with opening references to the Komagata Maru, a ship filled with Sikh emigrants seeking work in another part of the Commonwealth in 1914 that had been turned away from Vancouver and had come under fire by the British when it attempted to berth in Calcutta.25 Sharan’s father had been part of that voyage and had returned a broken man haunted by a sense of un-​homeliness and humiliation. Clearly, the text raises important questions concerning the structuring of dynamics of diaspora within the nation, and in the Canadian context, the account evokes the specter of another well-​known history, that of Japanese Canadian internments during the Second World War.26 The novel ends on a muted note of hope when the adult Jasbeer, who had disappeared within the shadowy ranks of various separatist movements, wends his way back to his distraught mother, Nimmo, who has been driven insane by losing her husband, youngest son and daughter in the reprisals against Sikhs following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Jasbeer’s experience with Sikh extremism thus mutates into recognition of the importance of familial loyalties and intimate connections, which can so easily be derailed by nationalism and sectarianisms of all persuasions. One might say that the novel comprises numerous examples of Braidotti’s “specific forms of accountability” by drawing attention to the contemporary traumas that striate the micro-​histories of

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those living alongside each other within national boundaries. Badami’s novel is profoundly Canadian, with constant references to familiar Canadian cultural markers, but by imbricating this “here” with a less familiar “there,” she interpellates Canadianness in fundamentally new ways.

Revising Unhomely Histories Shani Mootoo’s work occupies a rather different time and space in the Indian diaspora, and illustrates how crucial these details are when interpreting diasporic texts. Although born in Ireland, Mootoo grew up in Trinidad and immigrated to Canada in the early 1980s. Her “community” comprises both the indentured plantation laborers analyzed by Vijay Mishra (2007) and Sudesh Mishra (2006) and a transnational Queer nation. Her first collection of short stories references the same Main Street as Badami’s text. Indeed, her much-​ cited story “Out on Main Street” (1993), written in Caribbean patois, is a gritty evocation of a “butch-​femme” lesbian relationship being tested by the same kind of community Badami represents as inhabiting the Delhi Junction Café, but situated very differently in its emphasis on another kind of sexual politics. As Mootoo’s narrator observes dourly, “Walking next to Janet who is so femme dat she redundant, tend to make me look like a gender dey forgot to classify” (48). The narrator has no illusions that this is any kind of community with which she can claim kinship: I used to think I was a Hindu par excellence until I come up here and see real flesh and blood Indians from India. Up here, I learning ‘bout all kind a custom and food and music and clothes dat we never see or hear ‘bout in good ole Trinidad. Is de next best thing to going to India, in truth, oui! (47) Another story in the same collection, “Sushila’s Bhakti,” also explores the issue of authentic Indianness: Where the heck did the Indians in India come from anyway? They were in India, I’m told, for a long enough time that the question is pointless (isn’t Hinduism the oldest religion in the world?). But didn’t the majority of these Indians originate from someplace else, in the West? This majority, weren’t they once themselves White(ish) folks who invaded the Indian continent? So who are the ones that have carbon-​datable sediment from the prehistoric soil of that continent gritting up their genes? The Tribals, the ones with pre-​Hindu gods and goddesses? (The statement that Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world seems, now, a

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little wobbly.) What is my point of origin? How far back need I go to feel properly rooted? I must be looking for an Indian Cro-​Magnon. (64) Behind such statements are echoes of Avtar Brah’s critique of “fixed origins,” as well as Vijay Mishra’s caution against setting up the supposed purity of the home country or “the denial that the homelands of diaspora are themselves contaminated, they carry racial enclaves, with unassimilable minorities and other discrepant communities, and are not pure, unified spaces in the first place” (2007, 5). In her second novel, He Drown She in the Sea, Mootoo shuttles her characters between an imaginary Caribbean island and British Columbia, Canada, and situates heteronormativity as the unspoken backdrop to her plot. Harry St. George is the son of an orphaned Indian man, Seudath, brought up by the descendants of African slaves, and Dolly, daughter of indentured Indians. Raised by his widowed mother, he falls in love as a child with the daughter of the diasporic Indian family for which his mother works, and much of the novel is taken up with Harry’s lessons concerning the ways in which class differences within the Indian diasporic community are structured on the island. Here is an example of Dolly speaking to her son: They family come here, to this part of the world, same as mine, you hear? […]They cross them terrible waters […] in the same stinking boats. All of we lie down side by side, catch head lice, cough, and cold, chew betel leaf together, and spit blood. They enter this country through the same procedures. They did have to line up for placement, answer the same questions, and do daily hard labour under estate boss and the hot sun in cane field. Everybody get treat the same way. […] And no matter how some rise, how some fall, or how some stay put, all of we […] and by that I mean people who have their eyes in the back of their heads always facing abroad, as if abroad even noticing us here on this island, and people who can’t take their eyes off from the one spot where their feet planted—​all, one and all, stem from the same tide. And it have a time every one of us was servant. (2005, 219) Whereas these differences are internal to the community, the old colonial white groups are another distant presence and below them in the social hierarchy are the black community, descendants of African slaves. Harry’s mother, for example, retains a prejudice against them, even though it is this community who takes her in when all her support structures fall away. It is also this community that finally allows Harry to escape from the island with his lost love, against all the odds. Set against this scenario is the life Harry has successfully fashioned for himself in Canada. In an autobiographical essay titled “On

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Becoming an Indian Starboy,” Mootoo (2008) tackles these nuanced accommodations with the past when she writes about the ways in which she was torn as a child between the constraints of being her grandmother’s “good Brahmin girl” and wishing to become part of the vibrant black traditions, such as calypso, that permeated the Trinidadian landscape. The other subversive influence was Bollywood and a queer identification with its male heroes: One could say that to this date the model of masculinity I  am most at home with in my own performance of a female masculinity is that of the Indian star boy, as we called him back then, the one who was wronged, fought for justice in the fairest but loneliest of ways, the one who, only when he was outnumbered by an impossibly large gang of heavy-​metal chain-​wielding thugs and subjected to a beating that left him with a bloody but neat gash on the side of his forehead, would he finally be forced to clench his fists, and resort to violence. Against all odds and those kinds of numbers, he would, somewhat reluctantly at first but then with dance-​like agility and the studied precision of a ninja, deliver a series of blows that would result in him winning back his dignity, the family that had mistakenly shunned him, his and their reputation, and the girl who had danced, sung, and cried with him (in his attire of incredibly beautiful vests and rakishly worn scarves) through wheat fields, around lakes, and on the slopes of the Himalayas. (90) Mootoo’s style wears its political interrogations lightly but is no less serious for all that. Thus she distances herself from the defining models of prescribed behavior cherished within some aspects of the complex Indian diaspora, but at the same time displays her immense affection for these traditions.27 Mootoo’s humorous depiction of the democratic appropriation of Bollywood accessories as markers of identification raises the further aspect of what has been termed a kind of commodity fetishism by critics who attempt to grasp the cultural and psychic economies at work here. Sudesh Mishra refers to “milieu effects” as “markers that convert a terrain into habitable/​hospitable territory” (2002, 27). He goes on to refine this point: “Treated uncritically, ritualistically, milieu effects lose their semantic function, become fetish objects that inertly affirm an archaic order of things. When treated critically, however, they are flexible dispute-​generating signs encouraging a continuous refiguring of territory. […] Since they are linked to other ways of knowing, being and doing, these exterior effects work to reconfigure the contours of a given territory” (28–​29). Indeed, when these rituals and texts are unmoored from their historical contexts, they become vulnerable to being appropriated in terms of commodity

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fetishism—​exotic accessories anchoring the many forms of neocolonialism that critics keep identifying and endlessly rediscovering. When immersed in these petrified contexts, they perpetuate malign rituals, but when these elements are productively inserted into new signifying systems, this can be very creative:  bhangra music is an oft-​cited instance.28 A  more literary example is found in Vijay Mishra’s Prologue where he charts his differing encounters with the Bhagavadgita as first a “footnote to Arnold, not as a text in its own right” and years later as a guide for rediscovering himself as a diasporic and postcolonial subject-​in-​process (2007, xvii–​xviii). Re-​signifying such commodities (texts, rituals, objects) allows diasporic artists to create new grammars of subjectivity, part of those resistant tactics mentioned earlier in relation to interpellation as misrecognition.

Reviewing the Homeland after Diaspora My third example, Yasmine Gooneratne’s novel The Sweet and Simple Kind, draws on her long association with Sri Lanka and substantial knowledge of its history. As she describes it succinctly in Diverse Inheritance, “for Sri Lanka the recent past counts 150 years of Portuguese rule, 150 of Dutch rule, and 150  years as a British colony or dominion” (1980, 2). As a member of the Banderanaike family, Gooneratne enjoyed a highly privileged vantage point from which to observe these tumultuous decades, and her earlier account of that complex family history, titled Relative Merits (1986), clearly informs the dense underpinnings of this fictional text. Gooneratne is a diasporic writer in the sense that her current fictional reengagement with her home country has passed through the years of living in another context, Australia, an experience reflected in her earlier novels and poetry.29 Her first novel, A Change of Skies (1991), explored the various ways in which Asian immigrants were exposed to particular forms of racism in both the nineteenth century and the latter part of the twentieth century. Her protagonists, Bharat and Navaranjini Mangala-​Davasinha, become Barry and Jean Mundy in order not to overtax their Australian neighbors’ powers of civility. Their assimilation is facilitated by talk-​back radio, particularly in Jean’s case, who celebrates her mastery of Australian idiomatic usage by offering a friendly parting sally to her husband’s colleague: “May all your chooks turn into emus, Professor Blackstone […] and kick your flaming dunny down” (1991, 129). Gooneratne does not spare her compatriots either, and her satiric force is as trenchantly directed toward the prejudices she encounters within the diasporic community itself. It also helps to know that Gooneratne is the patron of the Jane Austen Society of Australia since her approach to social satire via the status of women and their confinement to domestic relations informs her writing style to great effect.

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The family memoirs, Relative Merits (1986), are, as one would expect of the genre, written with diplomatic restraint, but the satire is not completely repressed there either. The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006) clearly arises out of this earlier text, and while the characters are composite ones, elements echo familial personalities, and events in the memoir resurface in the novel in lightly transmuted form. The novel is set in the years after Sri Lanka’s independence (1948) and before its descent into protracted civil war.30 Events are largely seen through the eyes of a spirited young woman, Latha Wijesinha, who both relishes her English education and, fueled by the debates regarding postcolonial identity, simultaneously interrogates its values and universalist truth claims. Latha’s cousin Tsunami is the daughter of a Sinhalese mudaliyar (landowner, on his way into a post-​independence Cabinet position) and an Indian woman.31 Latha’s own family ties place her in the “poor cousin” position, but this also means that her values are underpinned by the more liberal and idealistic world views of her less ambitious father and, to a lesser degree, her nationalistically minded mother, Soma. Latha has internalized all the post-​independent idealism for her country, whereas Tsunami is the target of post-​independence Realpolitik. Watching her cousin’s skirmishes with parental authoritarianisms and ruling-​class corruption, Latha is able to fathom the ways in which the Sinhalese dominance in national affairs congeals into increasing fundamentalism and aggression against the other minorities in the country: Tamil, Muslim, Christian and Burgher. As Gooneratne puts it in the family memoir: Cultivating English modes of living and thinking, the members of my father’s clan had imbibed a very proper English prejudice against Jews, “frogs,” “Chinks,” “niggers,” “Japs,” “Huns,” “fuzzy-​wuzzies,” “wops” and “wogs” of every description. English upper-​class scorn of the lower orders in British society was easily translated, in the context of Ceylon, into a whole-​hearted contempt for merchants, traders, members of “inferior” castes. […] Tamils, Burghers, Parsis and Muslims were, of course, literally breeds apart:  acquaintance with them was possible, friendship rare, and marriage unthinkable. Growing up in this narrow world of self-​consequence, inherited privilege, and acquired prejudice, a Bandaranaike knew (and cared about) no other. (1986, 100) Gooneratne also depicts the ways in which a progression to “ethnic cleansing” based on these prejudices precipitates the 1958 race wars (2006, 569ff.). Unlike the memoir, the novel unleashes the satiric arsenal that characterized Gooneratne’s earlier analysis of Australian mores and attitudes toward immigrants, particularly Asian ones. An expert in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​ century English literature, Gooneratne takes a finely honed approach, as on

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the occasion when Latha encounters the views of her aunt (who will eventually succeed her husband as prime minister) on the importance of not having water pipes installed in villages so that the women can continue their picturesque and “healthy” walks thrice daily to the distant well (335). As was the case with Gooneratne’s own upbringing, neither Latha nor Tsunami is encouraged to seek any learning beyond their socialization to be competent wives and mothers.32 Though both manage to acquire a postsecondary education, this achievement does not necessarily strengthen their right to make choices concerning their own lives, and they are forced to negotiate the prejudices of older as well as contemporary patriarchal guardians (including women). They also encounter the racisms that permeate the University of Ceylon, whether it be via the warden of one of the halls of residence who discusses the unique smells of particular castes and ethnic groups such as the Tamils (297ff.) or the depictions of the gathering menace of the political tensions that have come to characterize the contemporary landscape of Sri Lanka.33 For example, much is made of the pressures to change to Sinhala as the official language. This debate is exploited to comic effect when the scions of the ruling class, educated abroad, find that they are unable to abide by this edict since Sinhala is largely a foreign language for them. There is also the somewhat bitter note in the memoir since it was this ruling that sent Gooneratne herself into exile (1986, 163).34 Even the simplest social negotiation, such as teaching at a secondary school, suddenly became a minefield in the post-​independence era: The social theories according to which young Mrs. Phillips was living her married life were not known to the Board of Governors at Amarapali M.V. What they did know, and greatly respected, were Paula’s solidly respectable Dutch Burgher background, her first-​class degree in English, and her ability to secure outstanding examination results. Following her arrival at the school, the reputation of Amarapali M.V.’s English teaching had soared. These things cancelled out the Tamil background and somewhat disheveled, Byronic appearance of Paula’s husband. (2006, 148) In Gooneratne’s text, the thin veneer of the ruling class’s benevolence collapses rapidly in the face of the political tensions that they are seen as exploiting in their own self-​interest, sacrificing the well-​being of their own in the process. In response to her attempts at autonomy, Tsunami’s eldest brother, Ranil, who had been the object of Latha’s adolescent dreams, turns on his sister after their mother’s (justified) desertion and father’s death. Tsunami is simply disowned and disinherited by the family guardians (her eldest brother and sister), though

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not by the younger sibling Chris, whose rectitude and subsequent indictment of his elder brother’s corruption rescues some shreds of idealism.35 Latha, after teaching in England for a time, returns to help her father write his exposé of Sri Lanka and to join Chris in attempting to shape a new future, though such utopian aspirations informed by lessons of dwelling otherwise in diaspora are belied by subsequent events in Sri Lanka (Roy 2009, 21). The three texts examined here attest to some of the complexities of the serial accommodations of diasporic women writers. These are all in their way polemical texts that exemplify the refusal to be interpellated in particular ways—​ whether this be by the homeland, or the hostland (those dominant others who define the nation), or the so-​called diasporic community who is often reified by traditional identitarian state multiculturalism. One heeds Vijay Mishra’s sobering context for diaspora studies: “Where once ‘Where are you coming from?’ implied the beginning of inclusion in a community, now the same question is shadowed by another question (‘What do we do with them now?’)” (2007, 5). Numerous studies, including recent ones organized around multiculturalism and New Labour in the United Kingdom,36 have shown that these double questions are never resolved. Those designated “diasporic” or “multicultural” can never display their allegiances to the nation-​state sufficiently, adequately or often enough to resolve the grounds of their differences. And for those diasporic subjects themselves, the wisps of interpellations emanating from home cultures are simply other ways of being hailed into being as a “what if ” subject and those “alternative systems of values” Braidotti (2006) identified in connection with the social practices of nomadism. At worst, such homeland interpellations reinforce archaisms and fundamentalisms and, at best, help to deterritorialize origins and identities and bring into play new forms of sociality. Such texts chart a course through the minefields of our transnational existence, illustrating new and flexible subjectivities that are surely our best chance for ethical and proximate survival amidst unequal global mobilities.

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Chapter 4 INDIGENOUS COSMOPOLITANISM: THE CLAIMS OF TIME We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours. (Scott 2010, 106) We are used to thinking of Indigeneity in terms of claims to land, but what about claims on time—​not in the sense of reminders of historical atrocities, but in the sense of the relativity of time in ways that recall the earlier discussion surrounding alternative modernities? This is at the heart, for example, of Pheng Cheah’s recent book on postcolonial literatures in relation to temporality (2016). As Cheah summarizes: “The mapping of the world by temporal calculations is premised on the conceptualization of the world as spatial category, namely, an object of the greatest possible spatial extension that can be divided into zones of quantitatively measurable time. The unity and permanence of a world are thus premised on the persistence of time” (2). Cheah references the work of William Kentridge’s recent installation The Refusal of Time, where Kentridge (working in collaboration with physicist Peter Galison) meditates on the ways in which the global imposition of Greenwich Mean Time created the possibilities for imperial capitalism:  “Kentridge shows how cartographical organization of the capitalist world-​system relies on Northern-​and Eurocentric regimes of temporal measurement. The subordination of all regions of the globe to Greenwich Mean Time as the point zero for the synchronization of clocks is a synecdoche for European colonial domination of the rest of the world because it enables a mapping that places Europe at the world’s center” (1). From a model of telling time by the sun, time was translated into grid units across the globe. Cheah goes on to distinguish between what he terms “teleological time” and “worlding” (a concept derived from Heidegger), where literature plays a more active role in opening up multiple temporalities: “teleological time works in the narrow sense by spiritually and materially shaping the world through the prescription of normative ends. […] Instead, time itself is the force of transcendence that opens a world […] this openness is an unerasable normative resource for disrupting

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and resisting the calculations of globalization. It opens up new progressive teleological times” (9). Ultimately this new perspective moves us from a “facile cosmopolitanism” to “a modality of cosmopolitanism that responds to the need to remake the world as a place that is open to the emergence of peoples that globalization deprives of the world” (19). Such a temporal model of cosmopolitanism and literature resonates with Indigeneity since the latter is often thought of as encapsulating primarily spatiality—​the supposedly hyper-​local (Indigenous peoples’ primary interest in their immediate “countries”) as distinct from the world (including its temporality). This perspective is exemplified by Native American critic Sean Kicummah Teuton, who argues that a “return to indigenous cosmopolitan writers […] uncover[s]‌an alternative conception of indigenous nationhood, attendant to territory and peoplehood […] a new model of the indigenous writer as a cosmopolitan engaged with the world for the sake of the community” (2013, 51). A point to stress here is that such differences are produced rather than lying there waiting to be discovered.1 Uncovering the cosmopolitan dimensions of those knowledges subjugated by colonialism in relation to globalism itself and including them in cultural studies has been the general goal of recent attempts to rethink cosmopolitanism. For example, the concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism has helped in the decolonizing project, which advocates the difficult task of separating oneself from a long and robust tradition of conceptualizing cosmopolitanism within Western philosophy in which the shifting categories of human subjectivity are increasingly seen to be predicated on either the exclusion or abjection of subjugated groups—​slaves, Indigenous peoples, refugees and asylum seekers.2 While on one hand cosmopolitan readings consist of ways of de-​familiarizing hegemonic ideologies (as in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing Europe”), they also convey a sense of how one might consider the world otherwise within a specifically Indigenous world view. In this version of globalization, terms such as the planetary might be a useful substitution in that it raises an awareness of the idea that the human should not be the measure of all things (and I will return to this). So Indigenous cosmopolitanism offers both a critique of and a way to situate oneself outside familiar conceptual ideologies, as well as glimpsing alternative imagined worlds that include alternative temporalities. An element central to such an imagining is the question of language, also at the heart of certain versions of postcolonial criticism and new conceptualizations of world literature. In a monolingual (and consequently often mono-​logical) context, it is very difficult to articulate thinking otherwise, and so another language becomes an important tool for extrication from the familiar, as a way to become more self-​reflexive about the mediatory nature of

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language and representation. The role of English, designated a global language, in this mix is complex, as I discuss in the next chapter.

“Moving between Languages, Bobby Wrote on Stone” In his quest to become familiar with his own Aboriginal heritage, Australian writer Kim Scott* speaks about allowing the sounds of Noongar to reshape his corporeality from within and to link these sounds with the elements of a specific geophysical place. In his nonfictional collaborative text Kayang and Me, Scott traces the process of this painstaking and affective journey undertaken with his relative Hazel Brown, who gradually inducts him into the Noongar language and knowledge system by means of their immediate family history. As he puts it, “Making the sounds of Noongar country […] It was as though I  was being reshaped from the inside out” (2005, 257). In his most recent novel, That Deadman Dance, Scott creates a text that animates this pedagogical process differently and pushes it further to produce an affective loop that includes non-​Indigenous readers, attempting to reorder their perception of Australia’s colonial history. The novel concerns those years of first contact and colonial settlement on the coast of western Australia (1833–​1844), the country of the Noongar nation from which Scott derives his heritage. Originally, that novel had the working title, Rose a Wail, a (poor) pun on a whale breaking from the ocean surface and the hint of an inarticulate cry of anguish. […] The first word of the novel is an attempt by a Noongar character to render a Noongar word in English spelling; the novel concludes with the central character delivering a speech in Noongar. But even more than this sparse spattering across pages and pages of English, Noongar language influences the imagery, rhythm and characters of the novel. (Scott in Zable 2011, 59) The book begins with the protagonist, Bobby Wabalanginy’s, older self looking back on the years in which he and his people first helped the settlers survive by sharing their resources with them only to be summarily ejected, in return, from their own country. At the same time, Bobby evokes the ways in which he himself studied and translated the new conceptual territory of these intruders, juxtaposing it with his own knowledge system. So for the implied reader, as modeled by the characters, the two frameworks of knowledge function to de-​familiarize the “homo-​hegemony” (Derrida 1998) of English.3 For example, the act of writing is juxtaposed with the dancing and singing that *Scott 2010, 1.

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is presented as a major form of Noongar communication to which the title of the novel also alludes. Dance is an embodied form of communication that includes the distinctive smell of an individual—​Noongar can identify each other through these individual smells—​all the senses are engaged in this formation of intimate knowledge. The “dead man dance” is itself a case of reverse appropriation in which the military drill of the colonial soldiers is borrowed by Bobby to create a dance that translates his analyses and understanding of these strangers for his own community.4 With large white clay crosses painted onto their chests, the dancers are like animated tombstones carrying sticks that represent rifles. After the sticks are “fired,” the men fall down but then rise again. Focus switches to the one dancer who touches them all into a more lasting death: People loved the experience of it. To have no will of their own but only Bobby’s, briefly. By the time he was a grown man everyone knew it had never been dead men dancing in the first place anyway, but real live men from over the ocean’s horizon, with a different way about them. There was difference among them, too, as a grown-​up Bobby learnt too late, but this was something people argued about. (Scott 2010, 69) Bobby is often characterized as a consummate mimic, but the significance of his mimicry needs to be fully considered. It is a term that brings to mind Homi Bhabha’s much-​ misunderstood notion of colonial mimicry (1994, 85–​92). Building on the more straightforward concept associated with V. S. Naipaul’s account of creating the “mimic men” of colonial “native” administration, who internalize the values of the colonizer to create (in Macaulay’s terms) “brown Englishmen,”5 Bhabha argues that something else is going on in a two-​way process. The mimicry of the colonizer by the colonized is indeed a kind of mockery that undoes the supposedly transcendental authority of the colonizer. In part this mechanism works by demonstrating that the colonizer needs to have his authority mirrored back to him by the colonized in order to shore it up. This necessity begs the question regarding its transcendent power since if it requires such support, it cannot be omnipotent and invulnerable in the first place. The mimicry is also a mockery in that it brings out the absurdity of the colonizer’s actions. Indeed, the white settlers are rendered uneasy by Bobby’s ability to mimic them: It was like Bobby was them, showing their very selves, inside their heads and singing their very sound and voices. […] Bobby could look through

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the eyes of anything. It made everyone unstable, surprised and hardly trusting. (Scott 2010, 376) By demonstrating that he understands both language systems, Bobby attempts, at a pivotal moment in settler–​Indigenous relations, to speak to the colonizers in their language, as well as his own languages of dance and Noongar, whereby “he would show how people must live here, together” (390). However, in this instance, his audience members turn away and the novel ends with the sound of gunshots heralding the grim future of the colonizing process that ultimately attempts to eradicate this prior world view and culture. To give one instance, the ethical structures of reciprocity that constitute the communal glue of the Noongar are perceived by the colonizers as illegal trespass, and so when the Noongar help themselves to the occasional sheep or to flour from the stores, they feel entitled to these since they had not hesitated to share their own resources to aid the first settlers to survive. Instead they are seen as thieves and on the strength of these “misappropriations” are expelled from their own “country” (the term Australian Aborigines use to delineate specific tribal areas)6 or, worse, executed. In terms of reciprocal power relations, the energy Bobby devoted to choreographing the dance may have represented a mistaken direction, as Scott suggests in an interview with Anne Brewster: “perhaps the dance as a form is not necessarily the form that’s going to powerfully speak to this mob—​the ones that get up at the end of the novel, dismissively; he hasn’t got them. But, just possibly, writing is [the form]. So it’s not a mistake what he did there” (Scott in Brewster 2012, 232). In other words, the writing more so than the dance enables stories to live on and create a pedagogical tool that renders this history legible. The rationale for the limited power of the dance may also lie in the many ways in which mimicry is understood simply as a one-​ sided reflection of abject processes rather than as a subversion of authority (in Bhabha’s sense). In Scott’s pedagogical framework for the novel, Bobby’s journal borrows from another technology and his learning is put to effective use: “you can dive deep into a book and not know just how deep until you return gasping to the surface, and are surprised at yourself, your new and so very sensitive skin. As if you’re someone else altogether, some new self trying on the words” (2010, 86). Writing and the journal, Bobby maintains, add to an archive that is, for better or worse, a recognizable and authoritative form of material history for the colonizers, even though its meanings may shift over time. It is one of the ironies of history, as many analysts of decolonization have observed, that the colonial archive becomes a necessary and primary reference point for the

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formerly colonized because it encloses their few surviving traces—​seeds waiting to be reactivated to aid the robust flowering of decolonizing resistance.

Ambiguous Archives The notion of the archive in these contexts is worth pausing over. Archives are fragile repositories at the best of times, and particularly so when linked to subaltern knowledges. What to do with books in public (including university) libraries is a problem faced all over the so-​called developed world.7 In the so-​ called undeveloped world, there is still a hunger for books, but there are also terrifying stories of the demise of ancient libraries such as those in Iraq during the Iraqi–​US war. We also think of the fragility of archives in the recent commemorations of World War I where only certain groups are traditionally recognized as part of that history.8 In her exploration of the slave trade and the devastations wrought by colonialism, Saidiya Hartman gives a vivid account of the importance of reading these colonial archives (often all that remains) against the grain: In other words, there is no access to the subaltern consciousness outside dominant representations or elite documents. […] The effort to “brush against the grain” requires excavations at the margins of monumental history in order that the ruins of the dismembered past be retrieved, turning to forms of knowledge and practice not generally considered legitimate objects of historical inquiry or appropriate or adequate sources for history making and attending to the cultivated silence, exclusions, relations of violence and domination that engender the official accounts. Therefore the documents, fragments, and accounts considered here, although claimed for purposes contrary to those for which they were gathered, nonetheless remain entangled with the politics of domination. In this regard, the effort to reconstruct the history of the dominated is not discontinuous with dominant accounts or official history but, rather, is a struggle within and against the constraints and silences imposed by the nature of the archive—​the system that governs the appearance of statements and generates social meaning. (1997, 10–​11) This need to read against the grain of an inherently “hostile” archive is particularly true of Indigenous history. In a recent documentary concerning Australian Aboriginal culture, there is a moment hard to watch when an Arnhem Land guardian elder, explaining the importance of passing on knowledge of the Law of Dreaming to future generations, apologizes for the

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tears that well up during her explanation (Davis 2014). As Kim Scott’s earlier novel Benang illustrates (1999), the traces of ancestors survive within the alien repository of the colonial administration—​the humiliating permits to travel, the documents of incarceration. Scott is particularly haunted by phrases such as “the first white man born” and the “last full-​blood Aborigine,” which he reduces to acronyms to demonstrate the ways in which they become metonymies of colonization, a type of shorthand for making legible the authorizing framework of the colonial archive. Scott discovers no place in the archives for ontological Aboriginality in that the thrust of the colonial administration was that they be “bred out” (2007, 3–​4). This example brings to mind the work of critical race theorists such as Denise Ferreira da Silva who trace within Western philosophy a “logic of exclusion” that works through constitutive inclusion, that is to say, in which “others” such as slaves and the Indigenous are the constitutive principle of (nonhuman) difference upon which Western white subjectivity is founded:  “Because raciality has been intrinsic to the institution of the very global (ethico-​political) subjects, emancipatory projects and visions of justice grounded in (neo-​) Kantian universality and self-​determination will remain self-​defeating because impossible goals” (2011, 146).9 It is a trend in critical race theory that began perhaps with the “necropolitics” of Achille Mbembe illustrating that the discourse of human rights, the desire for marginalized groups to be “included,” are misplaced projects because such groups are constitutively excluded from a conceptual system that owes its very ontological existence to their inclusion under particular terms of abjection (2003, 11–​40).10 To explain further, a comparable logic is to consider the long tradition of defining the human by differentiating it from the animal, or the example of sexual difference. In all these instances the processes of installing “difference” are, rightly, being interrogated.

Cannibal Christianity But let me turn to a different example of Indigenous cosmopolitanism. In Cree writer Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, the de-​familiarization mechanism I’ve been describing takes place in relation to the powerful frameworks of religious beliefs. In his important recent book The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King suggests that:  “Missionary work in the New World was war. Christianity, in all its varieties, has always been a stakeholder in the business of assimilation, and, in the sixteenth century, it was the initial wound in the side of Native culture. Or, if you want the positive but somewhat callous view, you might want to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-​side capitalism” (2012, 103).

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In Highway’s text, Indigenous cosmopolitanism excavates Christianity to show its violent and cannibalistic/​sacrificial roots—​those who are sacrificed are the colonized Indigenous peoples. Highway, a fluent speaker, has used Cree to great effect in his plays and this novel as a de-​familiarization device, but in this instance it is the colonial religious belief system that is rendered completely strange. The novel concerns the lives of two Cree brothers, Champion and Ooneemeetee Okimasis, who are renamed Jeremiah and Gabriel by the colonial system. As Gabriel puts it, Christianity asks people to eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood—​ shit, Jeremiah, eating human flesh, that’s cannibalism. What could be more savage—​? […] Do you wonder why the world is so filled with blood and war and hate when it has, as its central symbol, an instrument of torture? (1999, 184) Some years after the novel Highway produced a small volume on comparative mythologies in which he develops the implications of this cosmology further in a different rhetorical register of the reverse ethnographic gaze: And last, this male God gave us this Earth and then snatched it away from us—​the narrative of eviction from a garden, because of a woman’s stupidity, is a narrative that, so far as I  know, exists in three mythologies, and three mythologies only—​Christian, Judaic, and Islamic—​the only three mythologies extant on the Earth, so far as I know, that, not quite coincidentally, are monotheistic in structure, that have one God only. Space, in other words was taken from us, and time is our  curse. (2003, 31–​32) In Kiss of the Fur Queen, the brothers undergo the increasingly familiar catalogue of horrors perpetrated in residential schools. In the Australian context, children considered partially white were summarily hunted down and kidnapped and taken to missions and mission schools,11 whereas in the Canadian context, parents were coerced into believing that this was the only survival strategy for their children, and, at times at least, the children were occasionally permitted to return home, as did the brothers in Highway’s novel.12 Jeremiah watches the repeated nightly abuse of his brother, Gabriel, by the presiding priest at the residential school and transforms the image into the Weetigo, a cannibalistic spirit, “A dark hulking figure hovered over him like a crow. Visible only in silhouette, for all Jeremiah knew it might have been a bear devouring a honey-​comb, or the Weetigo feasting on human flesh” (1999, 79). The Weetigo, also referred to

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as the Windigo, is a mythological figure across First Nation cosmologies. In his text Drawing out Law, Anishinabek legal scholar John Borrows refers to “Windigos as people who went mad and took the lives of others, becoming cannibals. They’re also a symbol of greed and consumption because they are constantly hungry and devour all around them, but are never satisfied” (2010, 224).13 In a remarkable passage in the novel, the abused Gabriel turns the tables by exposing the Communion Mass in terms of a cannibalistic orgy: Flailing for his soul’s deliverance, the priest thrust out a hairy trembling hand. And by immaculate condensation […] a length of raw meat dangled from his fingers. What was a humble caribou hunter’s son to do? He exposed himself. And savoured the dripping blood as it hit his tongue. […] Up the aisle Gabriel bumped and clattered, his mouth spewing blood, his bloated gut regurgitant, his esophagus engorged with entrails. At every step he took, ghost-​white masks and gaping mouths lunged and shrieked: “Kill him! Kill him! Nail the savage to the cross, hang him high, hang him dead! Kill him, kill him.” (Highway 1999, 131) Against the world of abusive priests is set the trickster figure of Indigenous beliefs—​the shape-​changing, gender-​morphing vixen/​fur queen. Peeling off the usual white beauty queen skin, she reveals the animal beneath as something to be respected, someone who’s “running the goddamn show,” and not the usual “Grumpy, embittered, sexually frustrated old fart” (233–​234). As Highway explains in his comparative mythology volume: Christian mythology arrived here on the shores of North America in October of the year 1492. At which point God as a man met God as a woman—​for that’s where she’d been kept hidden all this time, as it turns out—​and thereby hangs a tale of what are probably the worst cases of rape, wife battery, and attempted wife murder in the history of the world as we know it. At that point in time, in other words, the circle of matriarchy was punctured by the straight line of patriarchy. […] Circles, however, and fortunately, can be repaired. Or an erect phallus can be… um…doused with ice water? Severed completely?—​before it’s too late. (2003, 47–​48) The trickster figure in Kiss of the Fur Queen and other Highway texts (notably his plays) is Nanabush, a gender-​morphing deity who is unpredictable, to say the least, but always life-​affirming.14

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The Planetary But how do these versions of Indigenous cosmopolitanism change conceptualizations of globalization? One answer is that they substitute the planetary for the global. What are the implications of this? As mentioned in previous chapters, Paul Gilroy associates the planetary with becoming more reflexively critical of one’s own culture by cultivating an estrangement from within. He locates a precedent in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters comprising the perspectives of “Muslim” visitors to Paris in the eighteenth century, as well as in the figure of George Orwell, whose scathing critiques of colonialism from within its borders continue to be of great use to the decolonizing process (2004). Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity” speaks of “an imperative to re-​imagine the subject as planetary accident […] rather than global agents” (2012, 339).15 In order to skirt the problems connected to imagining alterity, Spivak considers the planet from an outside vantage point as a way to emphasize that it is not up to the human subject to imagine the Other. The moment the Other is imagined into being, a hierarchy slides into place or an “onto-​epistemology” of subjugation (in Denise da Silva’s terminology (2007)). Instead, Spivak refers to the Islamic concept of haq as a birthright that confers the responsibility to care for others. She differentiates this inherent responsibility from the concept of rights as it is traditionally conceived. In the logic she proposes, arguing for the rights of others is dubious because it constitutively reinforces the gulf between those who have rights and those who don’t. Such a process sets up an ethics inevitably haunted by an imperialist dynamic, whereas the concept of inherent responsibility to and for others sets up a different ethical dynamic.16 How one relates this conceptual apparatus to literary interpretation is a challenge—​Spivak conveys it through Mahasveta Devi’s novella “Pterodactyl” via Indigeneity and geological allocthonous demographic patterns—​basically rocks that migrate.17 Recall here Kim Scott’s reference to Bobby writing on stone and Tomson Highway’s statement quoted earlier in this chapter: “Space […] was taken from us, and time is our curse” (2003, 31–​32). These conceptions of the planetary connect with the growing literature on the posthuman and the fundamental interrogation of the human as the measure of all things. The idea that everything is animated is a staple of Indigenous cosmologies where features of the landscape are recognized as living links with ancestral creation stories, as well as invoked as participating in communal consultations and decision making. One thinks here of work such as that of Andean anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, who describes what she terms “a pluriversal politics” that includes other than human actors, whom she terms “earth beings”: “A reading of the Andean ethnographic record along

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epistemic lines shows that earth-​practices are relations for which the dominant ontological distinction between humans and nature does not work. […] The ‘things’ that indigenous movements are currently ‘making public’ […] in politics are not simply nonhumans, they are also sentient entities whose material existence—​and that of the worlds to which they belong—​is currently threatened by the neoliberal wedding of capital and the state. Thus, when mountains—​say Quilish or Ausangate—​break into political stages, they do so also as earth-​beings” (2010, 341–​342). In other words, we encounter “earth-​ beings demanding a place in politics” (346). So to put it differently, whereas much of the neo-​cosmopolitan debates are concerned with rethinking notions of individualism—​as citizens, as having access to rights, to cultural franchise, there is another fruitful trajectory that links to debates concerning the posthuman in which responsibilities are extended beyond traditional Western concepts of the “human.” And it is here that Indigenous cosmopolitanism has a great deal to offer. As Kim Scott puts it, “Rocks can set a narrative in motion, animate the stone” (2005, 248).

Deep Time The implication for thinking in planetary terms concerns nothing less than a restructuring of time and space. While I’ve given a brief indication of what this means for the spatial, and have referred to Pheng Cheah’s reconceptualization of cosmopolitan time, we might also consider the concept of “deep time” usually associated with geological time. In her study of American literature across deep time, US critic Wai-​chee Dimock turned to this concept for the following reasons: “What this highlights is a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric” (2006, 3–​4).18 Later in her study she explains further: What is the advantage of using geological time as a human measure? One effect, it seems, is that it compels us to rethink the phenomenology of race itself, seeing it retrospectively, against the history of the planet. Three million years ago there was no such thing as Homo sapiens in the world. And when this class of primate finally emerged, there was no such thing as Asians or Europeans or Americans. All of us came from Africa, the ancestral home of Homo sapiens in prehistoric times. (177) But as I’ve indicated in the references to animated rocks, deep time cannot simply be relegated to the past. Here, for example, is the opening to Australian Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright’s monumental novel Carpentaria19 that deals

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with contemporary Aboriginal lives threatened by rampant mineral resource extractions, among other erosions of their cultures: The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than storm clouds, came down from the stars, laden with its own creative enormity. It moved graciously—​if you had been watching with the eyes of a bird hovering in the sky far above the ground. (2006, 1) Wright goes on to illustrate the ways in which her Indigenous characters constantly reanimate what is called the “Dreaming” in Australian Aboriginal belief systems that are passed down to each generation and pervade their lives by means of songs, dances and rituals (Watson 2001, 106–​112). In other words, the ancestral dreaming is constantly remade through each generation and there is a custodial relationship between each generation and their country or nation.20 This is why the Aboriginal elder from Arnhem Land was weeping at the thought that this custodial link might be interrupted. The deep time of such belief systems is certainly beyond the human and it connects in interesting ways with the Islamic concept of haq (responsibility) mentioned earlier. This custodial relationship to the land is the background for Kim Scott’s novel and through the dance of the title is a tactful reminder of the centuries of complex beliefs contained in that particular cosmopolitan belief system. Alexis Wright’s novel is also arguably a rejoinder to iconic Australian novels concerning colonial race relations produced by white Australia, for example, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975). While undoubtedly well meaning, Herbert’s texts cast the Indigenous peoples in terms of an inescapable abject history, whereas Wright’s text restores agency at many levels. Although there is no room for a detailed analysis here, this is another example in Wright’s text where rocks have agency (as do all her characters, needless to say). At a critical moment when one of the main characters is about to be killed by a vengeful white emissary of the mining company: “the yellow-​haired man tripped. Instantly, his head was split open at the temple by a rock that had, up to that moment, lain on the ground, embedded in soil that was thousands of seasons old, untouched by humankind since the ancestor had placed it in this spot, as if it had planned to do this incredible thing” (2006, 405). In a recent essay on the impact of atomic experimentation on Indigenous peoples across the globe, Helen Gilbert refers to the work of geographer Nigel Clark, who makes a case for questioning the opposition between the nomadic and the sedentary and calls instead for “vertical mobility—​‘going with the flow of dramatic transformations, through time, on the spot’ ” (2013, 9).

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Whereas horizontal mobility gains its impetus through displacement, vertical mobility is “ ‘geared to adaptation, improvisation, and resilience at local levels’ ” (202). Kim Scott, Tomson Highway, Alexis Wright and other Indigenous writers offer to induct non-​ Aboriginal readers into their cosmopolitanism—​ temporal as well as spatial—​a blueprint for survival in the face of the risks the planet faces.

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Chapter 5 THE COSMOPOLITANISM IN/​OF LANGUAGE: ENGLISH PERFORMATIVITY It is not coincidental that all the diasporic writers examined in Chapter 3 write in English, now the dominant world language. In The Idea of English Ethnicity, Robert Young asserts that “Englishness was created for the diaspora—​an ethnic identity designed for those who were precisely not English. […] It is, finally, English itself […] which holds the Anglo-​Saxon world together fraternally in its impatient, perpetual circulations” (2008, 1–​6). But what does this mean for those who are not part of the Anglo-​Saxon diaspora but who are nonetheless “in” English, an English perpetually haunted by another language? This chapter examines the ways in which English signifies metonymically in four recent novels from China and the Chinese diaspora, chosen because they all foreground English as an enigmatic reference point:  Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-​English Dictionary for Lovers; Wang Gang, English; Ruyan Xu, The Forgotten Languages of Shanghai; Ouyang Yu, The English Class. English and its meanings proliferate in unexpected ways.1 To illustrate this, let me relate a confluence of disparate events:  I  am asked to assess the research of a faculty member in a Southeast Asian university and discover only belatedly that the person is an applied linguist in second language acquisition. It dawns on me that I was contacted because of being institutionally (and globally in the terms of internet search engines) affiliated with English, but clearly this domain includes specific English-​language teaching in the Southeast Asian context. I am definitely not an expert in linguistics but have dabbled around its edges as part of my attempts to parse the theoretical implications (and turbulence) of operating in languages other than one’s first language. We are all split within language, but what are the effects and affects of being split among languages as well? The second event was my exchange with a colleague in Asian studies who questioned what she perceived as my attempts to police the ways in which a literature course was being taught in women’s and gender studies (an interdisciplinary field after

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all) by a nonnative speaker of English. It made me stop to ponder what I was policing and consider my own investments in English. Born in Germany, I left when I was four for Australia (which had accepted my parents, classified as refugees but then called “displaced persons” or DPs), having already (precociously and anxiously) learned to read and even write (rudimentarily) in German before I  belatedly entered the Australian schooling system when I  was six. While I  (unexpectedly) came top of second-​year English at Melbourne University, I  was always reminded that I  was not “native” to English throughout my 45-​year career—​whether it be colleagues (still) politely questioning my deployment of commas or senior colleagues, when I was still untenured, leaving obsolete books of English grammar in my mail slot (with all the aggression that such “jokes” entail). Pretty clearly my life was punctuated by demands that I  prove my mastery of (dexterity with) English. Perhaps it was due to a mild unease provoked by the mysterious provenance and pronunciation of my name and (possibly) my phenotype, though, in case of the latter, not when compared to those whose destinies are determined by prescriptive euphemisms such as “people of color” or “visible minorities” in Canada or the even more mysterious NESB (non-​English-​ speaking background) in Australia.

English Performativity Englishness was constructed as a translatable identity that could be adopted or appropriated anywhere by anyone who cultivated the right language, looks, and culture. (Young 2008, 1) Robert Young argues that all Englishness is performative (3) and that it comes into being through the Anglo-​Saxon diaspora (I would add the Celtic one as well, but more about this in the conclusion). If Englishness is regarded as performative, then taking that logic further means that it is not confined to the Anglo-​Saxon diasporas, but, arguably, within anyone’s reach. Young’s thesis echoes Gauri Viswanathan’s (1998) significant contribution to postcolonial studies, her argument that English literature was generated via colonialism to function as a covert secular ideological system (unlike missionary proselytizing) that would produce those mimic subjects required for colonialism to flourish. It also resonates with Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, a mimicry of the colonizer that undoes his authority (1994). In other words, in the colonial schema, being able to perform Englishness needed to be aspirationally available to anyone. However, within global English (clearly a key component within Englishness), the meanings attached to linguistically enunciative positions differ (I speak; I am spoken), as do the geopolitical positions from which

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one speaks English. How these meanings come into play is explored in this chapter in the context of rather wide-​ranging concepts of cosmopolitanism.2 Such meaning making began early with England’s first colony—​Ireland. Someone once remarked that Synge wrote in Irish and English simultaneously. The English of this novel is inhabited from the inside by the tones and rhythms of Irish, so that from the viewpoint of Standard English its idiom is as persistently off-​key as its realism […] the spectral presence within them of a language other than English. […] Being stranded between two tongues in this way was one reason Ireland proved so hospitable to modernism […] typically the work of literal or internal émigrés, men and women caught on the hop between different cultures and language. (Eagleton 2011, 23–​24) In response to Eagleton’s observation, one could argue that the meanings generated by the field of “world English” swing between the structures and tropes of modernism as well as postmodernism. However, Eagleton’s review reinforces the logic that we have (since Deleuze and Guattari first explored it) associated with the notion of minoritarianism and language, in this instance in relation to a major language—​English.3 Such minor explorers of a major language are consistently characterized as having a heightened sensitivity to the linguistic components that would lend themselves so well to the evolution of Derridean deconstruction—​those fertile internal contradictions. After Derrida, we have assimilated the fact that we are all strangers within language, any language. Whether this is due to the modernist writers or to Wittgenstein, Saussure, Benveniste or Derrida, we understand that the ability to take up a speaking position cannot be taken for granted and always involves a splitting (I speak; I am spoken). It certainly does not provide a stable foundation for identity. “No, an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures” (Derrida 1998, 28). So then what does it mean to be asked to reside precariously in another language, a language that always comes with historical (including ideological) baggage? Some of the answers depend on the monolingualism of the culture: The monolingualism imposed by the other operates by relying upon that foundation, here, through a sovereignty whose presence is always colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressibly, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous. This can be verified everywhere, everywhere this homo-​hegemony remains at work in the culture, effacing the folds and flattening the text. (39–​40. My emphases.)

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For example, Englishness has long rested on the assumption that it is the only language required, Umberto Eco’s “perfect language” with its allusion to Paradise before the Fall and Babel (1997). Communication (as in the womb) was characterized by plenitude and required no effort. Thus it is more difficult to assert the legitimacy of other versions of English within cultures that strenuously reiterate their monolingualism, such as Australia, than officially bilingual cultures such as Canada’s.4 Postcolonial studies is filled with contemplations of those approximations to the colonial tongue—​dialects, patois, creole, pidgin—​the terms proliferate and all indicate an inferior relationship to the “homo-​hegemony” of the master tongue. There is also the sense that they carry subversive secret codes such as those that allowed the enslaved or oppressed to communicate with each other within earshot of the masters. But what happens when these groups, these diasporic communities, finally assert their rights to change or challenge authoritative versions of the master language? This challenge is, for example, the basis for Evelyn Nien-​Ming Ch’ien’s (2004) lively study Weird English5 (or the assumption behind Dohra Ahmed’s (2007) anthology Rotten English). What happens when these new speakers and writers of English subtend it with other resonances (the acoustic element predominates)? Indeed, the authority or legitimation resides in the claim that these performances are embodied and oral, representing the everyday use of the language that clamors to be recorded: “weird-​English writers denormalize English out of resistance to it, and form their own language by combining English with their original language. In immigrant communities where weird English is exclusively an oral phenomenon, pidgins and misspellings may have meant a lack of education or fluency. But for weird-​English writers, the composition of weird English is an active way of takin’ the community back” (Ch’ien 2001, 6).6 The English language is also increasingly thematized as designating a passport to global mobility. In the novels considered here, the desire for English becomes imbricated with a more familiar and recognizable manifestation of desire—​sexual desire. Perhaps the substitution of one desire for another occurs because it is quite difficult to represent the quest for linguistic versatility alone in compelling terms.7 Not that such language acquisition is all positive; in the opinions of the four novelists I examine, too much reading or learning of English ages one prematurely and exposes one to Westoxification (Wang), gets in the way of healthy masturbation (Ouyang Yu), and certainly removes one from healthy social relations with one’s peers (Xu). In the face of these negative connotations, the idea of learning English translated into sexual desire provides a kind of balance: all four texts represent the pursuit of English within constellations of heterosexual desire or, in the case of Wang, homosocial desire.

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Ouyang Yu: The English Class English as a language that could hold his attention for weeks on end, a linguistic woman. . . (Ouyang Yu 2010, 234) Ouyang Yu’s8 text moves among third person intimate, first person and italicized sections as reflexive explorations of what it means to create both text and persona—​ostensibly the voice of the author—​in a double sense—​who both distances himself from and identifies with the protagonist—​an example of Derrida’s phantasmatic identifications. It seems strange that in English you always say “I” do this or “I” do that but in Chinese you could write a whole story without using a single “I” as if the word “I” did not exist. But of course if “I” write the story, “I” do not have to assert “I’s” presence every time the “I” appears. The other thing he found about “I” is that it sounds exactly the same as the Chinese word for love, pronounced “ai” or “eye.” (55) The sections in italics deal with the present tense so that the rest of the text delineates a retrospective consideration of how the immigrant authorial voice came to be situated in Melbourne Australia. At the same time, the authorial voice notes that “In Chinese there was not such a clear sense of the tenses between the past and the present” (169). The protagonist, Jing, is animated by a fantasy that he is the product of a mixed union—​he describes himself repeatedly as whiter than most Chinese.9 Trapped by the slogans of the Cultural Revolution, English provides him with a virtual reality (52) and functions like Esperanto (52)—​a world language that also helps convey a sense of the world outside his constrained context. The implication is, however, that English comprises an artifact rather than an embodied language. Within the environs of the truckers of the Transportation Team to which he has been assigned, English is “Englishit” (63) and he is constantly accused of arrogance by his coworkers for indulging in learning it. His absorption in English can also lead to dangerous driving when he pins the vocabulary list to his dashboard and windshield (95). Jing finally escapes from his career as driver when he is successful in the university entrance exams (revived after the Cultural Revolution). In the second section, “Living Under English,” Jing encounters classmates who invest differently in English—​ whether it is Xin who wants a chance to pursue his gay identity elsewhere (139) or Zhao Feiyan who aspires to English as a pathway to the good life of unfettered consumerism (150), or the tragic figure of Wei who is bewildered by the goal of learning a language that to him is far inferior to Chinese and

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who finally commits suicide, almost as a kind of patriotic protest (179). As a reminder of the cultural dangers of foreign language study, the sinister Mr. Miao, in charge of political protocols, keeps the English class under particular surveillance and cautions the protagonist to not let English poison him with its Western literature (285). Meanwhile, Jing finds himself drawn increasingly to mastering his own language and culture the more familiar he becomes with English (154, 160), something that the recent Cultural Revolution had made difficult. Paradoxically, the more he pursues his English lessons, the more nationalist he becomes. As a way of asserting the complexity of his own language, he indulges in constant wordplay across the two languages (136ff.).10 Meanwhile, Mr. Fu, the English teacher, encourages the class to embody or corporealize the language: to write it, speak it and see it—​engaging all their senses. “Linguistic entanglements like this easily tired him out, as he muttered and chewed them until his tongue got tied, tired, tarnished by the Englishness of his thinking” (200). Instead of feeling that he is playing with words, he feels that “words are playing with me” (237). He finds that his vision of the world is mediated by the classic English texts he is studying. “He was literally living under English, willingly, masochistically, uncritically and perversely poetically […] he saw his local lake through the eyes of Wordsworth and Coleridge” (234). When the class acquires another teacher from Australia, Jing forms a liaison with the teacher’s estranged wife, Deirdre, who eventually helps him to immigrate to Australia. The third section, “The Price of Freedom,” is set in Melbourne and finds the increasingly melancholic protagonist, now called Gene and living with Deirdre, feeling a misfit in both the place and the language. Deirdre’s father, a psychiatrist, diagnoses him as suffering from “a Chinese-​English linguistic and cultural conflict” (364) whose symptoms included the inability to swallow anything (“found all things hard to swallow”), including most foods (365). As Gene explains to Deirdre, “I hated China and ran away from it but the language I ran into never accepts me. It’s not the people. It’s the language” (367). While the relationship with Deirdre helped him both to enter English more fully and to leave China, he also feels demeaned by his position within Australia and accuses her of domesticating him into a woman (381)—​initially courted as the linguistic woman (cited previously), English/​ Deirdre has now emasculated him, which translates as equivalent to rendering him female. In an outburst toward the end of the text, Gene describes English as an “ever-​growing and ever-​expanding rubbish tip that collects all the linguistic garbage in the world” (381). The energy fueling his rant11 is provided by the italicized sections of the text that house the frustrated persona of “Gene,” marooned in Australia, whose creativity is relegated to “head-​writing.”12

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Wang Gang: English When you know all the words in that dictionary, you will be able to live like a real English gentleman. (Wang 2009, 47) While Ouyang Yu’s text plays with the movement between the two languages, Wang Gang’s novel, a type of Bildungsroman, is a translated text in which the abrasions between languages are smoothed out to render an “idiomatic” text for English readers.13 The text approximates a kind of dialogue with the presence of an implied reader addressed directly as “you” throughout (e.g., 55). In general, one can assume that this reader is situated in North America and needs to have much of the context and history of the text explained. As in The English Class, the “desire” for English becomes intertwined with sexual desire, heightened by the fact that the protagonist is a pubescent boy whose encounters with English run parallel to his learning about the world of adulthood. Set in the marginalized Muslim Uyghur region of China, the narrative plays out during the Cultural Revolution.14 English takes over from Russian (3), and one of the questions never quite resolved is to what extent Russian and English are part of the same homogenized sense of the West. The tale begins with the Russian teacher, a Uyghur woman named Ahjitai, who is an object of desire to the boys and men in the town of Ürümchi, being replaced by the English teacher from Shanghai, who is rather cruelly named Second Prize Wang. The protagonist, Love Liu, has parents who are both architects and thus disgraced intellectuals, banished to the outer territories. The father is repeatedly humiliated by the regional party leaders while the mother carries on a clandestine relationship with the school principal, and the possibility that he is Love Liu’s biological father permeates the text. While burgeoning sexuality is a defining element in the protagonist’s formation, there is also an element of homosociality in that the English teacher functions as a model for masculinity—​he is referred to as a “gentleman”—​and this is variously glossed in the text and includes the use of cologne and the wearing of a well-​pressed suit. “His refined style was like a piece of Baroque music, balanced and modest” (46). As in the case of Ouyang Yu’s text, Freudian concepts spring to mind, particularly in the example of the English dictionary, which functions variously as fetish object or as portable phallus. Borrowing or stealing the dictionary (the only one extant in the region) animates a number of characters in the text: It was the dictionary I  couldn’t find the night I  broke into Second Prize Wang’s dormitory. I  felt sad, and a bit angry. Why did I  break my leg? Because of that dictionary. Why did my parents hate me? Why

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did I  want to run away from home? Because of that dictionary. But don’t think I  hated it. On the contrary, I  felt only affection for it, so much so that I forgot Ahjitai—​that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and that I was in her room. It was as if I were alone with a glittering chest. I walked over to it and flipped it open. The word masturbate appeared before my eyes. (227) And so it continues. Second Prize Wang initiates Love Liu not only into English and Englishness, but also teaches him to masturbate, thereby invoking the implacable wrath of Love Liu’s mother. The world evoked in the text is that of the oppressive regime of denunciations and executions that prevailed during the Cultural Revolution. English is consistently viewed with suspicion and classes are periodically and arbitrarily cancelled. But what does “English” encompass; what metonymic burden does it carry? It is certainly linked with notions of traditional cosmopolitanism in the sense of “civilized” (or lifestyle) attributes—​the scent of cologne or cold cream and having compassion, as well as (curiously) learning the American pop song “Moon River.” Second Prize Wang is described as a missionary whose religion is English (255). But in the eyes of his own community, he is also linked with having “loose morals.” The fact that Second Prize Wang holds separate tutorials for the female students in his room is judged to be a sign of his corruption by the community, including Love Liu’s “educated” parents. Much of his fall from grace hinges on his denunciation by Sunrise Hang, the clever female student who resents the fact that the teacher appears to favor Love Liu over her (marked, indeed, by the loan of that dictionary). Second Prize Wang is deprived of his post and sent to a labor camp. There is a grotesque scene of a public execution where all dissidents and prisoners are forced to watch and Second Prize Wang is trucked in together with Sunrise Huang who, at that point, has also been imprisoned for having accidentally shot her colleague. Sunrise Huang demonstrates her undiminished strength of character and worship of her former teacher by singing the Internationale in ringing English (291). In the midst of all this turmoil, Love Liu fails the university entrance exam and ends up replacing his old teacher in the same college. Belatedly he learns that his father too can sing “Moon River” and had his own relationship to English—​a comforting confirmation that was never offered during the struggles the protagonist experienced in his desire to learn English as well as attain manhood. The afterword puts this more graphically, that the author was made to feel a criminal for wishing to study English (311). Somewhat ambivalently, English functions as metonym for a world that is not permeated by the fear and distrust promulgated by the Cultural Revolution in which people were

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pitted against each other within communities and within families—​a version of cosmopolitanism.15

Xiaolu Guo: A Concise Chinese-​English Dictionary for Lovers Guo’s text was an early engagement (2007) with the theme of intertwining an erotic relationship with the learning of English. Guo’s narrator is the daughter of peasants who have become upwardly mobile manufacturers and send their daughter off to learn English at the source. Guo’s text constructs a complex text based on “broken English”—​a disconcerting approach that undoes the English as a foreign language (EFL) fetishization invested in the aspiration of learning an English that must ideally be mediated by native speakers. Conspicuously, the dictionary of the title means a standard dictionary as well as the protagonist’s own dictionary of 80 terms set up as a conversation with the lover who functions as a repository of the language and Englishness itself.16 The protagonist, who calls herself “Z” because her name is too difficult for English tongues and ears, seizes the opportunity to engage in a relationship with an older Englishman who is, in his own way, also an outsider—​he is bisexual and deeply alienated from the urban culture of London, thus abdicating the values of his cultural capital. Using him as a native informant neatly turns the tables on this colonial stereotype. Understandably, he becomes progressively tired of this role, and on a number of occasions the protagonist describes him as depleted of language: “I steal all your beautiful words” (232). The text is also a register of cultural misunderstandings that begin with his polite phrase “be my guest” when she asks to see his home, only to have it mistaken by her as an invitation to move in. These misconceptions on the narrator’s part create a number of instances of dramatic irony, thus forging a complicitous relationship with a more “knowing” reader. But it does raise questions as to the nature of this complicity. Other points of contention between the narrator and the lover concern the British sense of self and identity, which are put in conflict with Chinese notions of collective responsibility before meeting one’s own needs. The idea of tenses in English being at odds with a lack of tenses in Chinese culminates in the protagonist’s mother accusing her of only living in the present when she relinquishes her work unit status in order to create a new life in Beijing. It must be said that the critique runs in both directions—​on one hand, Englishness and English are satirized, but then so are some of the Chinese assumptions the narrator uncovers in herself. Permeating her catalogue is the percolating frustration at her lover’s lack of interest either in her self or in her culture—​this frustration is attached to but differs from their continuing debates about the tensions between intimacy and privacy. In a passage at the center of the text, the narrator starts with a text in

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Chinese aptly under the heading “nonsense” in which she describes her feelings of being swallowed up by English (142). A few pages later the device is repeated under the heading “freedom” (154). The lover displays interest only when she regales him with her notions of Chinese health, which leads her to catalogue, somewhat bitterly in the face of European ignorance, all the inventions for which the Chinese can take credit (228). Although the novel is written in English, it is intriguing to note Angelia Poon’s point, informed by her own bilingual skills, that “two moments in the novel where Chinese and English are juxtaposed offer the possibility of differing levels of understanding to the reader depending on whether the latter is a monolingual English reader or one who can read both English and Chinese” (2013, 4). Significantly, this text sets up a demand for linguistic reciprocity underpinned by the question: why is there no desire in this English culture to learn Chinese? She offers such lessons, minimally, through the Chinese passages cited previously and another where the plants in the lover’s garden are all given their Chinese names as well as a literal translation that creates a kind of poetry, for example, mint is “light lotus” and daffodil is “fairy maiden from the water” (53). At the end both characters are changed by their interaction, but nevertheless part company.17

Ruiyan Xu: The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai Published in 2010 and written in English, this novel by a New  York-​based writer approaches the issue of what English signifies in a somewhat different fashion. The plot concerns the protagonist, Li Jing, who is caught up in an explosion at a hotel while he is dining with his aged father, an academic. Li Jing, who had been the extrovert CEO of a successful investment company, suffers brain damage (much is made of the precise area the wound affects) that results in “Broca’s aphasia” (Xu 2010, 23), a condition in which he is unable to communicate in his primary language, Chinese. While he continues to understand and even read Chinese, he can only speak in rudimentary English, a language to which he was exposed in the first 10 years of his life while living in the United States. The results are that Li Jing becomes alienated from his wife and son as well as his dying father. The family hires an American neurologist, Rosalyn Neal, to help with his rehabilitation. Rosalyn, in turn, learns to appreciate her own exclusion from everyday communication when she tries to function in Shanghai. Unsurprisingly, she and “James,” as Rosalyn refers to him, become more intimate while Meiling, Li Jing’s wife, is preoccupied with holding together the investment company. The novel concludes with the newly empowered wife (Meiling) overlooking her husband’s disability and

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temporary infidelity for the sake of the continuity of the family and their son, but in greatly reduced circumstances. Li Jing now occupies a stereotypically “castrated” position (similar to Ouyang Yu’s protagonist) in that he chooses to continue his own life within a Chinese he knows, resignedly, he will never be able to master. He deliberately declines the alternative, a life with Rosalyn and increasing fluency in English. The symbolic power of the choice not to function in English has interesting implications for a notion of cosmopolitanism in the sense of an engagement with the world. Rosalyn is to some degree an embodied version of this global sense of English in its American edition—​she is newly divorced, lonely and sexually promiscuous as against the austere Meiling who continues to be loyal to the marriage and a traditional concept of family. So family values are implicated and certainly linked with Chineseness in its diverse permutations. The two languages appear to compete with each other in the wounded brain of Li Jing—​suggesting that facility in one language comes at the expense of the other (156).18 If this text represents another kind of allegory of Englishness, it may well be that, like Ouyang Yu’s text, it reinforces a resistance to global English and Englishness (in this instance in its American incarnation). What draws these texts together is a “thematic” interest in English as a path to an alternate functioning of globalization. There was the refusal of English tantamount to a refusal of a certain model of globalization projected by Ouyang Yu and Xu’s texts while for Wang Gang’s text, English functions as a reference point that allows for an examination of the Cultural Revolution that had been excised as a topic for public and private conversations. The atrocities and guilt it left in its wake demanded articulation. For Guo and Ouyang Yu, the demand was rather for reciprocity—​that the pressure of learning English required an answering curiosity in this Anglophone sphere for recognizing the significance of other languages operating in the world—​that those learning English were not blank slates, but resonated with English through other linguistic frameworks, prior literacies.

Coda In assessing the research of the faculty member from Southeast Asia, the term cosmopolitan was used in the materials sent me and was somewhat loosely invoked in the idea of students from Southeast Asia traveling to sojourn in England in order to train them to be better speakers of English and to contribute to their growth as global citizens. The subtext was that the Chinese students’ exposure to the English culture as well as the language would open

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their minds to other possibilities. The old nineteenth-​century colonial civilizing mission was lurking in the wings. The whole postcolonial enterprise of creating colonial “mimic-​men” encapsulated by Macaulay’s Minute on Indian education thundered in the background, but then the Dalit example cited in the notes to this chapter (Lahiri 2010) suggests that a revised interpretation (yet another meaning for English) lurks on that postcolonial horizon. The other aspect of the Southeast Asian assessment that made me ponder is that experts in this field of English as a second language routinely grade their students in terms of a metric (Intercultural Development Inventory: IDI) that rated whether they had reached the preferred state of “a worldview that highlights cultural commonality and universal values” (Jackson 2010, 61). In other words, this comprises a functioning “cosmopolitan metric” and as such deserves scrutiny.

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Chapter 6 ACOUSTIC COSMOPOLITANISM: ECHOES OF MULTILINGUALISM Acoustic Palimpsests My proposition in this chapter is that Australian letters and “scenes of reading” (Dixon and Rooney 2013) are not just those produced in English and that, moreover, like many englishes within global English, Australian English is haunted by the accents of other languages.1 Derridean deconstruction privileged the authority of “presence,” whereas writing was designated as a type of second-​order, mediated communication where stable meaning receded ever further. As cited in the previous chapter, Derrida’s later work (Monolingualism and the Prosthesis of Origins) accentuated the fact that the enunciative split precluded the claim to own language, to fully control its meaning (“the hegemony of the homogeneous”). However, while emphasizing the instability of language and meaning, Derrida, an Algerian Jew, confessed to his intolerance of accents in relation to his own French monolingualism. So in the realm of voice, orality and presence there was another order of authority. He points out that such accents are not generally detectable in writing. In her recent perceptive book Not Like a Native Speaker, Rey Chow (2014) takes up Derrida’s claims to demonstrate that if one looks at language in relation to colonialism, an argument could be made that the colonized, in their linguistic subjugation, understood far more consciously than the colonizers that the hegemony of the homogeneous does not exist. So this chapter will examine the oral dimensions of multilingualism in Australia but, perversely, situate these elements textually. To what extent does this hum or “presence” of other languages (Indigenous as well as others) fundamentally destabilize the authority that English appears to enjoy within a national culture that strenuously perpetuates its colonial monolingualism? To what extent do these other languages merely create accents that reinstate a yearning for homogeneous origins in the dominant groups? The topic may also have been inflected, or performatively engaged, by the skepticism that people express in Canada when I tell them that I am Australian and they tell me (occasionally somewhat indignantly) they had not heard the

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accent in my voice—​as though I’d been hiding something. It may also be informed by the fact that I have pondered for years why people read out their own writing at academic conferences. What does that reading add: intonation, accent, another layer of composite identity? What supposed truths concerning interiority (the true self) and embodiment are projected onto these manifestations?2 Philosopher Adriana Cavarero (2005) argues for the singularity and uniqueness of each voice, but how adept are we at decoding that singularity and how do we transition from that concept to plurality or the collective? All this led me to ponder, in turn, the dynamics among multi-​and monolingualisms and their relationship to national literatures and to what degree the concepts of “mother tongue” or “native speaker” had a place in all this. Furthermore, how might one begin to track the acoustic palimpsest of the mono-​and multilingual; was it possible, for example, to suggest an accent in writing without sliding into a caricature of “broken English,” which conjured up the stage migrant?3 Furthermore, how does one begin to analyze a conglomerate national accent inflected by other languages—​Jean-​Luc Nancy’s “singular plural” (2000)—​specifically in relation to Australian nationalism and Australian culture/​literature? Traditionally scholars differentiate between language as communication, everyday transactions and writing. But of course I am bringing them into proximity (as does Cavarero). Postcolonial studies, for example, has a long history of bringing these elements together, though not quite with the material singularity of Cavarero’s work. Postcolonial scholars demonstrate how English itself when combined with local and embodied speech sprouted many englishes—​ that this was ultimately the effect of societies grappling with an imposed colonial language.4 Initially, the languages of the colonized were often rendered illegal. For example, slaves were not permitted to speak their African tongues, and in the settler colonies Indigenous languages were also banned: in residential schools in Canada, for instance. The example I often use to teach this issue is Patricia Grace’s chapter from Baby No-​Eyes (1999) that gives an account of a young Maori girl eventually dying as a result of being forbidden to speak her first language in her first school—​Grace’s searing narrative traces the annihilation of a fledgling self. More recently, there has been interest in the hybrid tongues that evolved out of the fusions of English (and sometimes French) and Indigenous languages (Chinook, Mitchif) or English and languages of migration (Chinook infused with Chinese),5 the latter, for example, typified by the Caribbeans who came to London in the postwar period and produced writers such as Sam Selvon and more recently Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith, drawing on those traditions. Caribbean theorist Edward Brathwaite (1984), one of the earliest to explore this phenomenon of englishes, refers to “nation language” as the fusion of Caribbean languages and English—​the invention

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of an eloquent new instrument. He also characterized this process as one primarily of voice, of an embodied speech that was indeed animated by the unique intonations of the whole body. Orature is another way of referring to this phenomenon and draws attention to the long tradition of oral literatures (including epics) in many parts of the world. It is the element of “orature” that is part of what I am analyzing in Australian writing—​that combination within the performative of both the typological and the unique. Arguably, the embrace of englishes happens unevenly, depending on the settler colony’s specific history (Canadian as distinct from Australian or New Zealand). Examples proliferate in anthologies such as Dohra Ahmad’s Rotten English (2007) or Evelyn Nien-​Ming Ch’ien’s study Weird English (2004). To quote from the latter: “Weird English wants to do more with English than communicate what the subject is; it also wants to show who the speaker is and how the speaker can appropriate the language” (Ch’ien 2004, 8). Reverse appropriation in relation to a colonial history is at the core of this process. If we consider these questions through a deconstructive lens, Derrida reminds us that writing was often seen as a displaced form of speech—​the latter providing the authority of the voice and presence. How does one invest writing with such a presence—​of individuals as well as larger collectives that require authorizing, such as the national? A legislated authoritative language is one way—​a mother tongue that supposedly guarantees origins.6 Languages in their plurality engender many anxieties that, in turn, spawn policies to discipline their manifestation. Growing up in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, I was certainly aware that once I left the multilingual environs of the western suburbs in Melbourne, care needed to be taken in publicly speaking a language other than English, on trams, for example, where there was often not much tolerance for “foreign tongues.” These languages intruded not just as noise, but as nuisance.7 Now with the dissemination of mobile phones and the proliferation of multilingual conversations in public spaces the old dynamics have changed. Those public spaces might be described as “non-​places,” a concept developed by Marc Augé, and I will return to this later. Do the conversations in Languages-​other-​than-​English (LOTE) catapult listeners instantly off shore as in virtual travel, or do they still constitute a betrayal of imagined national cohesion as they did in the past?8 To what degree has there been a shift in designating public/​private spaces and what has happened to tolerance for the “noise” of other languages within a predominantly English monolingualism? Consider musical theorist Martin Daughtry’s notion of “acoustic palimpsests”: “To imagine the unheard as the barely heard and strain to listen past the acoustic foreground down to the ghostly echo, the faint trace of obscured selves that lie on or just beyond the periphery of audibility” (Daughtry 2013, 9–​10). If we had to identify examples of this acoustic palimpsest in Australian

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writing, then poets such as Π. O. and Ania Walwicz come to mind: Π. O.’s tour de force, 24 Hours (1996), is set in Melbourne’s inner city Fitzroy (with echoes of Joyce’s Ulysses). It is hard to extract a quotation because the effect is cumulative and mostly the languages are a version of phonetically transcribed Greek and evocation of other accents: Back inside (the shop) the Boss’s wife is yelling at a kid to get away from the soccor-​table incase one of the rod pokes him in the “eye.” The kid starts “crying”! She goes round (the counter), sits down on a chair, picks him up, and lets him ride up’n’down on her slipper—​“layk hhorshi” (1996, 25) The sound of the writing ghosted by other languages is central to the poem. Walwicz’s work, in turn, uses the eloquence of “broken English” to articulate subtlety and nuances as in “New World” from her collection Writing: I am newborn I am new. Brand new. Me. I’m new. It doesn’t matter what happened before. Now I’m new. I’m going to start a new life. Go to a new state. Make a clean. Break. With my past. (1982, 67) What about the specific role of English or as Australian-​based scholar Anna Wierzbicka calls her latest book Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language? (2014)? In the postcolonial mix English’s role is complex. For example, within global English meanings rely on the geopolitical positions from which one speaks English. As noted earlier, Derrida’s work and that of other poststructuralists have taught us that we are all strangers within language, any language. Language does not provide an inherently stable foundation for identity. “No, an identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures” (Derrida 1998, 28). So then what are the implications of being asked to take up one’s place precariously in another language, a language that always comes with historical (including ideological) baggage? As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the answers depend on the investment in “monolingualism” of the culture (39–​40). In her recent study, Yasemin Yildiz points out that multilingualism has to contend consistently with the monolingual paradigm (2012, 6). World English can function as a quintessential example of such a

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paradigm, as example of “homo-​hegemony.” It is also more difficult to assert the importance and legitimacy of other versions of English associated with multicultural writing within cultures that strenuously reiterate their monolingualism, such as Australia, than in officially bilingual nations such as Canada. As stated earlier, Rey Chow’s argument is that the colonized understood far more consciously than the colonizers that the homo-​hegemony does not exist. Chow makes the further point that multilinguals are more conscious of revealing the split nature of relationships to language. It is more difficult to imagine one language as the “natural” articulation of interiority if one has access to more than one language. Australian English is thus split or fragmented in ways that deserve further analysis beyond the caricature of dialect to an acknowledgment of the prevalence of heteroglossia. To acknowledge the hum of other languages within and beyond English might facilitate a necessary expansion of sonority in relation to Brathwaite’s “nation language”—​ as a transnational continuum as well as more localized specificity. As Yildiz points out with respect to German, “This view of German as a lingua franca rather than as a purely national language could be a curative to the proprietary, exclusionary claims made on the language today. Instead of coloring the tongues of minorities in national colors, it would mean bringing out the new colors the language takes on through its multitudes of new speakers” (210). Chow, in turn, poses the disconcerting question that redirects emphasis in Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin: if we consider language itself as inherently prosthetic “imposed from without” (2014, 14), rather than as articulating inalienable and organic interiority, what other questions arise? If language is always an add-​on rather than a “natural” emanation of the subject coming into articulation, what follows, for example, in relation to a national culture? One direction Chow explores is to plot the concept of “tradition” in relation to language in terms of Foucault’s déjà énoncé as constituting neither instrumentalism (language as communication) nor idealism (language reflective of one’s inner being), but as “the resonances, connotations, associations, and memories […] that having been uttered and heard many times, cling to or hover around even the most simple individual speech acts, like the aura that Benjamin analogizes to traces of the potter’s hand” (53). The last comment refers to Benjamin’s well-​known concept of the “aura” as akin to the cumulative imprint of the craftsman’s particular shaping. If we consider this schema, then it follows that the cumulative imprint of usage, the construction of the prosthetic edifice of Australian English, might look somewhat different if it were to encompass all its usages to include both Indigenous languages and all those other tongues and resonant bodies that have entered Australia. Here is Chow again raising questions concerning the concept of the native speaker:  “A native speaker becomes audible or discernible only when there

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are nonnative speakers present, when more than one language is already in play, explicitly or implicitly, as a murmur and an interference. This condition of more-​than-​one, this multiplicity of accents that undergirds any claim to the oneness of native speaking, suggests that the presumed unity and continuity of the native speaker’s speech already bears within it what Deleuze calls an ‘inherent variation’—​a variation that is […] consistently suppressed through the misrecognition that the native speaker is there first, before all the foreigners with their unfortunate accents” (58–​59). We are brought back to the multilingual noise in public places. And it brings up consideration of not only other languages, but of accents; what more can one say concerning these accents? Given Derrida’s systematic destabilization of the relations between speech and writing in Of Grammatology, it is surprising to find the following passage (one that Chow analyzes in detail) where Derrida has the following to say concerning accents: One entered French literature only by losing one’s accent. […] I  do not believe that anyone can detect by reading […] that I am a “French Algerian.” […] I am not proud of it, I make no doctrine of it, but so it is: an accent—​any French accent […] seems incompatible to me with the intellectual dignity of public speech. […] Incompatible […] with the vocation of a poetic speech. […] The accent indicates a hand-​to-​ hand combat with language in general. […] Its symptomatology invades writing. […] I cannot bear or admire anything other than pure French. (1998, 45–​46)

Tsiolkas: Barracuda What are the implications for sharing or not sharing that accent in writing, in making that accent visible in writing? In Christos Tsiolkas’s most recent novel Barracuda (2013), there are ways in which the writing conjures up the speech that emanates from specific bodies, including their accents. The protagonist begins his evocation of interiority with breath and breathing—​words betray him, but breathing as an elemental force is akin to water itself, before speech, and is authorized by a body in its starkest form. The Dan/​Danny Kelly of the novel is in this instance, unlike other Tsiolkas protagonists, not Greek, but a mix of Scots and Greek. However, he inhabits the “wog” body recognizable from other Tsiolkas texts—​unlike his Anglo friends or Scottish lover, he is (in his own eyes) excessively hirsute and he sweats. Dan/​Danny is a working-​class, half-​wog boy (one drop of wog is sufficient in that racist logic) who wins a swimming scholarship to a private college in Melbourne, named with Tsiolkas’s signature old-​world courtesy—​Cunts College. In the

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first (to my knowledge) book-​length study of Tsiolkas, Andrew McCann (2015) takes his analytical bearings primarily from the ways in which class is a dominant reference point, and this idea is supported by an interview Tsiolkas gave in Canada’s national paper, the Globe & Mail, where he states in relation to Barracuda that, “I felt it was time to deal with the C-​word, that it was time to write about class. Class shapes everything: language, desire and consciousness. But, of course, what class means keeps shifting and changing, eluding us” (Tsiolkas 2014). McCann focuses as well on Queer thematics, for example, linking Tsiolkas’ aesthetics with the filmmaker Pasolini, calling attention to the violence and abjection imbricated in Pasolini’s Queer erotics (2015). However, for some readers, Tsiolkas’s work is as much about the exploration of ethnic fault lines in Australia and their imbrication in class striations. And it is in part through the evocation of accent that this element of ethnicity is marked. Notably in Barracuda ethnicity is not so much an issue for the protagonist as for swim coach Frank Torma: “Why do you take their shit?” You could hear his accent in the way he pronounced the word, “chit.” (Tsiolkas 2013, 11). While the Coach and his accent do not appear all that often, he is there as a guiding presence throughout for Dan (“without Torma, without his training, he was stuck in the in-​between” (51)). Torma surreptitiously takes up and shelters the outsiders in the school, constituting a causal logic that may lie in the fact that he is himself marked as an outsider within the “golden” world of national sports (164–​165). As part of conjuring this world of insiders and outsiders (via class, but equally, I would argue, in relation to deviations from the dominant and therefore unmarked Anglo-​Celtic ethnicity), the idea of any shared language is constantly interrogated. For example, attending a party at his rich school friend’s home, Dan finds himself unable to communicate with his friend’s father. He nodded to Danny but didn’t speak to him. It wasn’t that Mr Taylor didn’t like him—​Martin had assured him that that wasn’t the case. But they could not speak to one another, it was as if their shared language did not have the words in it for them to understand one another. So Mr Taylor nodded and Danny muttered an aho for hello and a té that would do for thanks. (114) As a contrast to the coach’s accent, there is the beguiling accent of Danny’s Scottish boyfriend, whose lilt charms rather than alienates his listeners (398).

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Not all accents are created equal. In an exorcism of his earlier life and perceived failures, Danny works with intellectually and physically disabled men who are often victims of racist violence, to some extent linking ethnicity with social abjection. In the course of the novel, Dan needs to make the language his own just as, for a time at least, he had made water his element: Dan had discovered that books did not exist outside of the body and only in the mind, but that words were breath, that they were experienced and understood through the inseparability of mind and body that words were water and reading was swimming. Just as he had in water, he could lose himself in reading: mind and body became one. (341) McCann’s study makes a case for Tsiolkas becoming reconciled to the form of the (predominantly British canonical) Bildungsroman as a mature acknowledgment of his literary precursors. I think one could debate the significance of this interpretation, but it might be useful to focus instead on McCann’s reference (2015, 115) to Tsiolkas’s introduction of amophorté a foreign (Greek) term in an essay on asylum seekers from 2013 (Tsiolkas 2013a). In McCann’s reading, this term gives non-​Greek readers access to a “foreign” sensibility, opening up a trove of meaning within English (amophorté being given the meaning, in Tsiolkas’s essay, of the natural civility possessed by those not formally educated) that does not quite translate into English. An excess is indicated here, a linguistic resource (with all the potential for exploitation that the term implies) that cannot quite be contained within English. It would be interesting to see the extent to which Tsiolkas incorporates such Greek terms directly into his writing and what they signify in each instance.9 It is also the case, perhaps, that the written foreign tongue is somehow more acceptable than either the spoken or the notion of an “accent” that infuses Australian English.10 The reception of Tsiolkas’s work within Australia and through him (though I don’t wish to be too prescriptive about this) the work of other “ethnic” writers is that the accent is usually unheard—​the degree to which class is set in opposition to ethnicity rather than often being fused together continues to bemuse me.11 That the reception of Tsiolkas’s work is skewed in this manner is also indicated in a review of Tsiolkas’s most recent short story collection published in the Sydney Morning Herald: Merciless Gods is as traditional as a story by Somerset Maugham or Henry James. […] It will leave you breathless with admiration. […] It is, in the end, quite extraordinary that Tsiolkas—​the Greek gay boy who used to brawl and brag about his sexuality and his ethnicity with such clamour and self-​regard—​should have stuck to his guns […] produced fiction of

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such power and compositional grace with its hand so sure of its sense of the pulse of the world. (Craven 2014) The condescension of this review is breathtaking, but also starkly revealing of prevailing attitudes.

Castro: The Garden Book In an attempt, perhaps, to qualify his prejudice concerning accents, Derrida refers in Monolingualism to the work of Abdelkebir Khatib’s Amour bilingue, translated as Love in Two Languages. Critic Réda Bensmaia analyzes Khatib’s work as attempting to create a “ ‘rhizosphere’ to counter the logosphere” and furthermore evoking a “grating” noise in the French that destabilizes its monolingualism12 or the supposed purity Derrida so admires, “putting French in the position of the supplement, that is, by giving it a dual movement that definitively tears it away from any metaphysical or expressive cooptation, first by pulling the French language towards calligraphy, the grapheme, the interval […] and second by making us see and hear the other language (Arabic) in the between-​two-​languages, in the breach created by this very spacing, without ever bringing about a simple return to origins” (2002, 167–​168). In this account we have an illuminating model for another way to consider the multilingual within the monolingual. The reference to the grapheme is also a signal to move to another text, Brian Castro’s The Garden Book (2005). The novel is largely within the register of the visual, but the acoustic dimension irrupts in pronounced ways. Castro’s novel is set between the two world wars and explores class and race, including the racism leveled at Chinese Australians. One of the characters, Swan Hay (or Shuang He), for example, is born in Australia, but, based on her racialized features, she is unable to travel during the interwar years because she has no proof of Australian citizenship.13 Swan (echoing Proust’s Swann’s Way) is emblematic of the narrowness of options in that period for both women in general and a racialized woman in particular. Haunted by her own evanescence (in part because of being trapped by the racist stereotypes projected on her), Swan symptomatically writes her poems on leaves that she scatters between the pages of “penny dreadfuls,” among the used books collected by her increasingly white supremacist husband (119). Moreover she executes these poems in Chinese calligraphy—​a language she has had to learn since it was not in fact her mother tongue. Rey Chow makes the point that the Chinese script bestows comprehensible legibility in the face of spoken Mandarin and Cantonese that are incomprehensible to each other (2014, 108). Unlike spoken Chinese, the calligraphic,

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the second-​order writing, in fact unites those divided by the acoustic (embodied) dimensions. When questioned later by her American lover, Jasper, Swan explains Why aren’t these in English? It’s impossible to write in English. But Chinese ain’t your first language. That’s the reason. I  have no interest in communication. (Castro 2005, 195) What does having “no interest in communication” convey? Living in the Dandenongs where she collects her “tree skins” (127), Swan hears the ghosts who inhabit the Indigenous burial grounds near her house, one of the few intrusions on her increasingly reclusive life. Her leaf poems gradually disintegrate but some are saved by Jasper, who translates them and has them published in Paris. As their success grows, they are increasingly attributed to him and the prevailing belief is that Swan is a tantalizing myth he has invented to authenticate his own oeuvre. In other words, there are all kinds of ways in which Swan does not communicate. However, it is Swan’s son, Norman Shih, whose narrative frames the novel. Adopted by others, since she is not perceived as a fit mother, Norman, who is employed by the Rare Book Department in Melbourne University, gradually reassembles the fragments of Swan’s work. He locates a mother, if not a mother tongue nor a guaranteed origin: Her leafy analects do not exist anymore. They were only meant to last a leaf ’s lifetime. The rest was up to nature. Like Moses’ shattered tablets, her work would have to be recalled in memory and to speak it would be to lie. There were so many lies it is impossible to point to any original. She had finally written the book that caused her disappearance. (271) Norman renames himself after an eighteenth-​century Chinese scholar and poet and in turn becomes a recluse who reclaims an edenic garden in the wilderness, walled off from the world. It is interesting here to cite Castro’s earlier essay “Writing Asia”: The polyglot is a freer person, a person capable of living in words and worlds other than the narrow and confined one of unimagined reality. When we translate from one language to another we not only reinvent ourselves but we free up the sclerotic restrictions of our own language. […] Other cultures and languages reinforce and enrich us by powerfully affecting and destabilizing our familial tongue. (1999, 153)

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The quotation is an example of how multilingualism in Australia still requires special pleading instead of being able to be taken for granted.

Clarke: “The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa” Finally, Maxine Béneba Clarke presents another evocation of the acoustic palimpsest in her story “The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa” from her collection Foreign Soil (2014). The story conjures up a young Sri Lankan asylum seeker’s voice as he encounters a well-​meaning lawyer in a detention center. Sound is central in shaping his world. Haunted by his imprisonment in a potato chest nailed shut by the Tamil Tigers who forcibly recruited him, Asanka has an acute proprioceptive awareness of his surroundings. He knows the exact dimensions of his room and is aware of the precise meanings of his environment through the sounds he hears every morning after 421  days in detention (235). Asanka’s obsessive keeping of time via a digital watch given to him by a charity worker functions as an attempt to control what he can in an otherwise uncontrollable context. The world he inhabits is reminiscent of the “no-​place” coined by anthropologist Marc Augé. Augé differentiates “place” and “space” where the latter is converted into the former by being permeated by social relations—​space turns into place because of the affective relationships we form with others:  “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity will be a non-​place” (1995, 77–​8). Augé goes on to identify these non-​places as proliferating in our times since they are mostly geared around transit and mobility and are measured primarily in terms of time (104). In the detention center Asanka is unable to situate the space as a place so falls back on calibrating it in terms of time—​the micro-​seconds it takes him to get through the day so that he will not have to confront the millennia that measure his incarceration—​comprising a timescale with no end-​point. Asanka knows every sound in this section of the Centre. Every creak, footstep, drawer slide, cupboard slam, groan, furniture scrape and murmur. Every door clang. Every sigh. (Clarke 2014, 206) Each sound is calibrated in relation to the seconds that pass because he fears that if he stops counting he will be back with the Tigers and the nailed-​up potato chest. In terms of sight, the specular dimension, his surroundings are drenched in blood. When their asylum boat is halted by the Australian authorities, Asanka begins to wail. “The sound is not coming from his own body, but through it. Something is howling through him, through his mouth” (234). On

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one hand, he is a vehicle for the suffering of countless others, but this typology is in balance with his individualism. In the course of the story he becomes an individual but not one who is actually permitted to publicly express his individuality. “ ‘They keep coming, the Immigration,’ he says. ‘They are asking me the same questions. They don’t listen. It is like I have no tongue’ ” (236). As a result of not being heard, Asanka ingeniously uses the bobby pin and dental floss he was permitted to take from the lawyer’s handbag to sew up his lips. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that having no tongue is equivalent to the status of those whose tongues voice other languages. The other stories in Clarke’s collection often invoke the Caribbean accents of her background—​a reminder of the legacies of those who brought a certain kind of sound and animation to English. It is also noteworthy that, like Ania Walwicz and Π.O, she is a performance poet.

Post-​Multiculturalism These kinds of perspectives that minoritize modernity emerge from those diasporic figures who have been designated “multicultural” in some national contexts and leads to the question:  What are the intersections of neo-​ cosmopolitanism and post-​multiculturalism? With their rhizomatic roots in diaspora, post-​multicultural writers/​artists connect the post-​nation-​state to the global in new ways: they redefine the nation as well as critiquing the global by helping to dislodge the sense of entitlement held by dominant groups. As Nicolas Bourriaud suggests in his concept of a radicant aesthetics: And yet the immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer are the dominant figures of contemporary culture […] one might say that the individual of those early years of the twenty-​first century resembles those plants that do not depend on a single root but advance in all direction on whatever surfaces present themselves. […] It translates itself into the terms of the space in which it moves […] caught between the need for a connection with its environment and the forces of uprooting, between globalization and singularity, between identity and opening to the other. It defines the subject as an object of negotiation. (2009, 51) As I set out in the introduction, we move from the old dynamics of state multiculturalism to new conceptualizations of post-​multicultural by referring to the “post” in Lyotard’s manner of going “back to the future” (so to speak) to ask what was left out in the various constructions of multiculturalism in its first usages: as a way for states to manage difference and second, the attempts by various groups and individuals who felt excluded from national formations

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to argue for their own supplementary inclusions. Lyotard’s logic of the “post” becomes not simply a future orientation so much as the future anterior (the future in the past or back to the future) structured by anamnesis, a recollection or going back that discovers other possibilities for alternatives. I am suggesting that inside these vernaculars we need to expose the cosmopolitical dimensions that connect us to a world that should not remain fully mediated by the nation-​ state or by globalization. My argument is that what was left out of the multiculturalism we know was the immanent cosmopolitical element, something that draws us into the world via the perspectives of those “minority ethnics,” finding the cosmopolitical in the vernacular that comes to us from the spaces we used to call multicultural. All of these debates have at their core attempts to imagine fully the contradictory tensions that inhabit considerations of the one and the many: Homi Bhabha’s statement that adding to does not mean adding up. Critical cosmopolitanism enables this tension to exist constructively by harnessing a logic of the oxymoron contained in a term such as vernacular cosmopolitanism and, not surprisingly, writers and artists have presented us with ways of imaging and imagining this dynamic. The new cosmopolitical cultural texts that elaborate and animate statistical data reach out to us from those cages14 (as Ghassan Hage terms them) that too often comprise the ethnic and racialized dimensions of multiculturalism. A critical methodology of neo-​cosmopolitan literature would deal both with post-​multicultural writers who translate between very local and global sites and those international writers who often write from metropolitan locations and offer a grammar to other cultures in terms of much-​needed transnational cultural literacies that help undermine the current increasing polarization of belief systems across the world. Robert Dixon (2004) has suggested that Australian critics required a “situated cosmopolitanism” in order to move beyond the nation; others have argued for an embodied cosmopolitanism, and it appears clear that the presence of multilingualism is part of recognizing this embodiment. It is present in the work, for example, of Arabic Australian writers such as Michael Mohammed Ahmad15 and Omar Musa. The title of Abbas El-​Zein’s memoir neatly encapsulates much of what this study is about: Leave to Remain. As he explains the title, “I had found the British word for a visa, ‘leave to remain’ a little obtuse—​why not ‘permission to stay’ or just ‘visa’?—​I had failed to notice the reluctance subtly evoked by the words ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ ” (2009, 126). In a succinct and alarmingly acute analysis of the post-​Soviet failure to bring about an intellectual revolution in Eastern Europe, Bulgarian critic Miglena Nikolchina reminisces on the attempt to institute the perpetual “seminar” as a model to forge something new. Citing the work of philosopher

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Marmadashvili, she notes his refusal to read a text he had already written (we are brought back to one of the earlier questions as to why we read our written papers at academic conferences). What matters in writing or talking, is “the movement of thought.” Reading to an audience a text that has already been written makes no sense because it would arrest this movement. For the unfolding of these thoughts one does not need to stand in awe of finished texts—​one might write huge volumes like Kant or Proust but one might very well jot notes, write letters, give lectures, and talk with friends. (2013, 97) Alertness to acoustic palimpsests, accents and multilingualism may facilitate these new conversations in Australian letters that provide the movement of thought less constrained by the predictability of homo-​hegemonies engendered by monolingual ideologies.

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Conclusion BACK TO THE FUTURE AND THE IMMANENT COSMOPOLITANISM OF POST-​MULTICULTURAL WRITERS My Uncle Willy’s memoirs (he was a great-​great uncle) are vigorously waiting to be dealt with, so to speak. I have a photocopy of the original handwritten German plus a typescript in English, both of which (the typing and the translation) were undertaken by Willy’s wife, Lena, and they are a foundational text for what has animated my career for many decades—​a kind of windmill I insist on tilting at. But first a detour. In her recent book In Other Words, written in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri says, “How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine? That I don’t know? Maybe because I’m a writer who doesn’t belong completely to any language” (2015). I too attempted to learn Italian during my undergraduate years at Melbourne University, and not any Italian but Renaissance Italian so that I could read Machiavelli in the original. I was pursuing a double major in history and English and was inspired by Max Crawford to wonder whether Machiavelli was a closet idealist who was much more centrally wedded to his lengthy Discorsi (on Livy) than the infamous Il Principe (The Prince) and that the latter, rather than being a handbook, was a warning to the world about the consequences of unbridled dictatorship. Since German was my first language I  already knew that languages produced very different interior worlds and I was curious about acquiring these tools of perception. While on one hand, our immediate context in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne was made up of many different languages, I  was also aware from our induction into the society of the 1960s—​through school, newspapers and television—​that the Australian mainstream was not particularly receptive to multilingualism. Nevertheless, in my pursuit of other languages I had already gone for several years to Saturday classes in Russian since this was the closest I could get to Bulgarian (my father’s language) and, indeed, reached a level where I could take dictation in Russian but didn’t continue with it at university and so it has subsided again, lurking somewhere in my memory theatre (I like to think that

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I only have to open that door and…). Lahiri describes her move into Italian as a metamorphosis and alludes to Ovid’s Daphne. She describes her relation to the English she has abandoned: For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it. (166–​167) I can definitely relate to that burden of affect, though parsing it into precise emotions—​naming these—​is more difficult. In her recent novel What We All Long For (2005) Canadian writer Dionne Brand has a character, Tuyen, a Vietnamese Canadian artist living in Toronto, who is creating a lubaio—​a signpost made up of examples of people’s longings. Brand wrote a brilliant essay/​meditation called A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) that considers the ways in which slavery disrupts family ties and memories down through the generations: Places like this are dotted along the coast of Africa. These places became known as the Door of No Return. Does all terror become literary? These are the places that made everyone who went through forget their names. Here walls ate the skin, footsteps took the mind. […] It was a gift. Forgetting. […] A map, then, is only a life conversation about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves. (2001, 223–​224) The lubaio in her later book is a signpost rather than a map to amnesia and opens up both space and time in ways comparable to Pheng Cheah’s (2016) analyses of cosmopolitan postcolonial literatures in his recent book. My own relationship to English is complex. What I do recall is that it is accompanied by moments of pure affect (in retrospect after studying affect theory), in the sense that I am overpowered by sensations that have as yet to be named, and it led (on occasion) to intense performative moments. For example, as a part of a panel (in the 1980s) looking at the influence of “migrant writers” (as they were referred to then) on Australian letters, I stepped down into the audience and turned on the panel of well-​intentioned members of the Australian literary establishment and demanded of them what they thought their role was in these discussions. It might not have been the most productive of moves, but there were many similar moments, including the attack on my work (and those of others) by Robert Dessaix in the 1990s (1991). It isn’t

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entirely coincidental that I  seized the opportunity shortly afterward to continue my work in Canada for the next 23 years. But where did my obsessions with marginalized texts and writers begin? This brings me back to Uncle Willy’s memoirs. I have provided a kind of history in a book now out of print (Gunew 1994), and so summarize some of it here. The context was an interdisciplinary first-​year distance education course on narratology in which students were exposed to various forms of narrative, including film and visual material. Within the framework of an Australian oral history project, they were asked to research the Depression era, using family and friends for interviews. Realizing that people like myself would not find such an enterprise easy, it struck me that a comparable and more appropriate task for students from non-​Anglo-​Celtic families would be research into Australian postwar migration, but it was difficult to find appropriate teaching material. From this simple idea, I produced course material (to my knowledge the first of its kind). It comprised making two videos1 and an anthology called Displacements: Migrant Writers (Gunew 1981), which incorporated a wide variety of narratives dealing with the experience of migration, ranging from relatively unmediated first-​person accounts to complex texts that use unreliable narrators and multiple levels of irony. The second anthology was titled Displacements 2:  Multicultural Storytellers (Gunew 1987), and the changed subtitle illustrated the historical shift in approach over six years. It became clear that my project of “making an absence visible” needed to distinguish between immigrants writing about the experience of migration, and works by non-​Anglo-​Celtic writers (often second-​and third-​generation) that were characterized by their intimate links to linguistic and literary traditions other than those deriving from Britain or Ireland. The term migrant, as I pointed out at the time, conjured up subjects whose presence in the dominant culture was perceived as temporary, and this precariousness was further signaled by such widely used bureaucratic terms as NESB (non-​English-​speaking background), an exclusionary and misleading acronym that privileged a fixed background over language abilities that could vary from individual to individual and in individuals over time. Thus “Anglo-​ Celtic,” or simply “Anglo,” was employed to differentiate between the cultural contributions of those whose linguistic and cultural traditions derived from Britain or Ireland, and those linked to the 60 or more other language groups2 that formed part of the linguistic fabric of colonial Australia.3 In that earlier narrative I  cited The Oxford History of Australian Literature (1981), where the editor offered the following:  “The diversification of personal histories that one would expect to result from the influx of migrants from many countries of the world has not yet become a marked feature of Australian writing” (Kramer 1981, 8). I asked: what might be the reasons for

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such a statement since such personal histories had indeed existed since colonization began in 1788? Presumably the editor meant that postwar migrants in particular should or would contribute to the founding narratives of migration as well as offering different perspectives of “Australia.” This was certainly my devout wish. But had this changed over 35 years? In some cases, but not others, I  concluded, since more recent compilations of Australian literature gestured toward a further recognition of these other perspectives, but not unreservedly so. While the term migrant writing was occasionally used in the 1970s and 1980s to designate those writers born overseas, it was overtaken by related expressions such as ethnic or multicultural writer.4 In the development of more precise analytical concepts for Australia’s national literature, it was eventually acknowledged that it was more useful to distinguish between writers who were overseas-​born, and thus might be expected to be overtly concerned with the experience of migration and its attendant cultural and linguistic dislocations, and those writers who had intimate access to languages and cultures that did not derive from England or Ireland and who might or might not write in English. Current bibliographical work collected in the AustLit database5 that focuses on “multicultural” writers reveals that if one takes into account the second and third generations, roughly one-​third of Australians derive from other than Anglophone cultural traditions. In Australia these writings had currency first as “migrant writing,” then as “ethnic writing,” and subsequently as “multicultural writing,” and, as I’ve been endeavoring to argue, as post-​multicultural writers. Each of these terms is highly contested, not least because they continue to signal the entrenched alterity of various writings produced within Australia but perceived as deviating from the Anglo-​Celtic norm (Hage 1993; Huggan 2007). Describing a comparable history, Canadian critic Francesco Loriggio aptly summarizes the range of work that faces those involved in mapping such minority writings:  “One of the most interesting aspects of ethnic literature as a field of study is the obligations it entails. The critic is forced to work on many levels simultaneously. S/​he must name the texts, disseminate them, and, at the same time, at this particular stage of the game, define them, situate them within the literary agenda of the century and the debate it has fostered. Editing, translating, the journalistic piece or the one-​page review are not beyond his/​her ken. And neither are the more ethereal spheres of his/​her discipline. In short, s/​he must document the existence of the corpus, of the tradition, while grappling with the criteria that establish them” (1990, 21). In other words, such critics needed to discover relevant creative work from often ephemeral publications at the same time as they were assembling appropriate analytical conceptual tools (Gunew and Longley 1992). The difference

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between the Canadian and Australian experiences, for example, is in sheer critical mass; more people have always been working on these issues in Canada, and the Canadian critics had accomplished much more detailed studies on the histories and writings of specific cultural groups (Gunew 2004). Comparable work in Australia was more sporadic and ad hoc, and accompanied by different obstacles and prejudices that included the resolute monolingualism of the dominant Australian ethos. Until the 1990s, the general shorthand term for minority ethnic writings in Australia was migrant literature. In other words, it was seen as transitory and not really rooted in the place at all. It was often talked about in the marketplace as a literature that dealt with themes, characters and events situated “outside” Australia. To rectify these misleading generalizations, a small group of academics labored to change this picture and align it more closely with comparable international models (Corkhill 1994; Delaruelle and Karakostas-​Seda 1984; Gunew and Longley 1992; Mycak and Sarwal 2010; Sarwal and Sarwal 2009). Roughly five kinds of activity were involved in setting up multicultural literary studies in Australia: the production of anthologies and bibliographies; the establishment of material collections of multicultural literature; the framing of theoretical structures for the study of such materials, including the setting up of academic courses; reviewing and publishing multicultural writing; and working with government funding agencies such as the Australia Council to produce appropriate multicultural policies. All involved making an absence visible. Thinking about cultural difference in the Australian context began around 1979, which was also a period when Australian culture itself was being institutionalized. During the 1970s multiculturalism was consolidated as government policy (Jupp 2007). The dominant emphases were on questions of social justice, such as access and equity, and a welfare model of lack or disadvantage, referred to as a “deficit model” (Gunew and Rizvi 1994). In other words, Australians were asked to think in terms of a migrant/​ethnic “problem,” which often led to the construction of migrants or ethnics as the problem.6 Rather than assuming that these newcomers would contribute to the national culture through their different cultures and languages, it was often presented as a question of what had to be sliced off the national funding cake in order to lend credibility to the image of Australia as a democratically equitable nation: “In the 1970s ‘Australian literature’ was itself a relatively recent category within literary studies, yet to develop a strong scholarly and historical tradition. What soon became clear to teachers and researchers interested in cultural diversity was that the nation’s literary tradition, as it was then known, was in no way representative of the diverse linguistic, ethnic, and cultural composition of the Australian population. Where were the writers of non-​Anglo origin, and

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where were the stories reflecting their experience and cultures?” (Ommundsen 2007, 75–​76). It was also crucial to distinguish here between those government policies and institutions that were designed to manage cultural diversity and the claims for cultural enfranchisement that emanated from the various ethnic groups themselves (Ahmed 2012). The politics of these two areas are quite different, and often in conflict, but opponents of multiculturalism invariably merged them, and indicted both for dividing the nation (Appignanesi 2010). Multiculturalism intersects, but is not synonymous with immigration. As has often been pointed out, if immigration were to stop tomorrow, there would still be multiculturalism—​the co-​presence of many different cultural traditions and languages. In order to understand the contexts within which migrant or multicultural literature operates, it is useful to familiarize oneself with the history of the immigration of culturally diverse groups into Australia (Castles et al 1998; Jupp 1991; Lopez 2000). The National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia, which the Office of Multicultural Affairs published in 1989, provided a definition of state multiculturalism, and in addition the encyclopedia of Australian peoples reveals the diversity of the nation (Jupp 2001). But it is not only the state or official policy makers who define these social realities. Once immigrants and their descendants became interested in the whole field of “migrant writing,” it was a matter of sifting through old journals and anthologies in order simply to come up with the names of writers and examples of their work. In my own case, it resulted in the editing and coediting of four pioneering anthologies of multicultural writing (Couani and Gunew 1988; Gunew 1981, 1987; Gunew and Mahyuddin 1988). Curriculum work on what were then known simply as “migrant writers” was grounded more easily in interdisciplinary cultural studies than traditional literary studies, because this writing made sense only within the history and politics of postwar migration. By the time the second anthology was produced (Gunew 1987), there was a much greater mix of first-​and second-​generation non-​Anglo-​Celtic writers. Concerns were conspicuously no longer limited to the experience of migration. In popular culture, a voluble counter-​discourse was beginning to emanate from inner-​city Melbourne and Sydney; youths of non-​Anglo-​ Celtic background and prevailing stereotypes of the national culture were already being interrogated by second-​generation writers perched strategically between cultures. Second-​generation Southern Europeans became relatively famous: for example, the performance poetry pieces of Π.O. and the writings of Angelo Loukakis and George Papaellinas, Anna-​Maria Dell’oso and Zeny Giles (Gunew and Longley 1992).7 More recently and in the wake of this legacy of gritty urbanism, Christos Tsiolkas has arguably become one of the

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best-​known contemporary writers who both exemplifies and transcends the palpable presence of a “multicultural” legacy.8 The appearance in the mid-​1980s of Manfred Jurgensen’s journal Outrider indicated a different perception of multicultural literature by linking it with notions of world literature. Within the ambit of the “best” of ‘world literature’, the journal incorporated overseas writers and Anglo-​Celtic as well as non-​Anglo-​Celtic Australian writers.9 This represented another tactic for integrating multicultural productions with Australian literature. In the midst of these concerns, the third anthology, Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing (Gunew and Mahyuddin 1988), proclaimed in the introduction: “This is not a collection of migrant women writers, since some of the contributors are second or third generation Australians. The voices of those labeled ‘migrant’ have long echoed in Australia but have been confined to sociology and oral history. In other words, they have functioned as case studies or as ‘evidence’ for what has been perceived as the ‘problem’ of being a migrant, that is, not being a product of an Anglo-​Celtic culture” (xiii). It signaled a desire to be considered as part of literature rather than sociology. The primary function of both this volume and the fourth anthology, Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing (Couani and Gunew 1988), was to insert the writings of non-​Anglo-​ Celtic women into the mushrooming domain of women’s writing. By this stage Australian feminist debates were increasingly concerned with using sexual differences as a way to dismantle a universalist cultural politics. The anthology questioned various generic expectations of women’s writing: that it be confessional or autobiographical; that it was automatically authentic and unmediated by literary conventions; that “NESB” meant linguistic deficiency and so on. Many writers first published in Beyond the Echo went on to produce books of their own, thus vindicating the production of anthologies as a visibility strategy. In the past decade, most anthologies of Australian literature now include multicultural writers, but there is still controversy about the appropriate percentage and their function (Indyk 2009). In 1992 the first comprehensive bibliography of multicultural writers in Australia was compiled (Gunew, Houbein, Karakostas-​Seda and Mahyuddin 1992), which contained around 900 authors and numbered 300 pages of double-​column entries. Based on earlier work by Loló Houbein and Alexandra Karakostas-​Seda, it deliberately included second-​and even third-​generation writers. The project was immersed in the politics of taxonomies and categorization. The presence of second-​and third-​generation writers emphasized the continuing necessity to move beyond the category of the “migrant” so that questions of diverse cultural differences would infiltrate all future considerations of the national literature. The bibliography included some listings of the critical reception of these writers, together with information concerning

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translators. It was clear that about 33 percent published in English, 32 percent in English and other languages, and 35 percent in languages other than English. It included well-​known Australian writers such as David Malouf and Elizabeth Jolley, as well as Henry Lawson, iconic example of the origins of Australian literature, in order to point out the need to reassess all Australia’s literature in terms of the whole range of cultural influences and languages that have gone into its production. The object was both to facilitate analyses of ethnic writers in Australia and to raise the question of ethnicity and multilingualism in all Australian literature, including the ethnicities of Anglophone groups. The information collected as part of this project was mainstreamed into the AustLit database through the subsequent continuing work of Wenche Ommundsen and others.10 What was not part of the official record were the many letters and papers that we received when we contacted as many writers as we could. I still have some of those letters, but they are difficult to read with scholarly equanimity. It has also been difficult to find a place for this archive.11 In order for the designations “ethnic” or “multicultural” to have any robust intellectual purchase, they needed to include the specific cultural traditions of those whose ethnicity often remained invisible, that is, the British (including the Welsh, Scots, etc.) and the Irish.12 Certain conventions were reiterated in analyses of migrant writing. Under this rubric, writers, particularly those who drew attention to their awareness of languages other than English, were often perceived as dealing simply with their own life-​stories, as providing material primarily of interest to sociologists or oral historians. The playfulness or reflexivity manifested, for example, in the work of Rosa Cappiello and Ania Walwicz, was often overlooked. Those few writers who were generally recognized to constitute the initial field of “migrant writing” were restricted to a social realist mode established by the first writer to be thus considered, Judah Waten, whose Alien Son was seen as a paradigmatic text. As for setting up appropriate critical frameworks, in 1992 the first anthology of critical essays on multicultural literature was published under the title Striking Chords:  Multicultural Literary Interpretations (Gunew and Longley 1992) and celebrated an informal network of scholars who were interested in the field. This anthology contained bibliographic information on critical studies in the area of Australian ethnic minority literatures. It included approaches ranging from special-​author studies to thematic analyses and those that used poststructuralist theoretical perspectives. The book also contained statements by writers on how they positioned themselves in the migrant and multicultural writing debates. Quite often, writers objected to the special pleading they perceived as inherent in the labels “migrant,” “ethnic” or “multicultural” writer. Understandably, they wished to be considered simply as Australian writers.

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When they described themselves in those terms, they assumed that their ethnicity was accepted as part of that designation.13 To bring forward these issues into the public cultural arena still results in major culture wars (Indyk 2009).14 But the work of intervention in mainstream journals remains a central part of the enterprise, as is editing new anthologies, publishing essays or contributing to conferences and professional gatherings. The work is spread over a wide arena, and is very dependent on intersecting networks of patronage (Gunew and Longley 1992; Gunew and Rizvi 1994; Papastergiadis 2012). Publishing in Australia remains modest and this increased the difficulties for marginal writers. However, the rise of small publishers using the new technologies is encouraging. Some of these have links to specific ethnic communities, but others do not.15 Literature, like many other art forms, is not simply an extension of or coterminous with any community, ethnic or otherwise. A related consideration is that systematic attempts to assess the related role of ethnic media either in giving a forum to ethnic minority writers or in airing cultural matters to both minority and majority audiences have only appeared sporadically (Ang, Hawkins and Dabboussey 2008).16 It is also clear that curiosity concerning and research into the long history of multilingual community newspapers is helping fuel future research and is appearing in important outlets such as Journal of the Association for Studies in Australian Literature (Huang and Ommundsen 2015; Jacklin 2015; Seaton 2015). Being marginalized cannot be reduced simply to a struggle between oppressor and oppressed in which the latter remains utterly passive. In their spatially conceived representation of exclusionary gestures, margins have always been ambiguous elements that have served to frame the center in terms of indictment as well as approbation. This point is raised in all its complexity in Derrida’s essay “The Parergon,” which examines aesthetic judgment by reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment through Heidegger. After pondering the nature of parerga (ornamentation), and specifically the drapery surrounding statues, Derrida moves to consider the columns adjacent to buildings, and from thence to the concept of the border or frame. This process raises fundamental questions about what is excluded and what included in the operation of aesthetic judgment. First, how is the object defined in terms of its relevant constituent elements, and then how is it evaluated? As Derrida puts it: “No ‘theory,’ no ‘practice,’ no ‘theoretical practice’ can be effective here if it does not rest on the frame, the invisible limit of (between) the interiority of meaning (protected by the entire hermeneutic, semiotic, phenomenological, and formalist tradition) and (of) all the extrinsic empiricals which, blind and illiterate, dodge the question. […] Every analytic of aesthetic judgment presupposes that we can rigorously distinguish between the intrinsic and the extrinsic” (1979, 24–​26). Later he refers to the “violence of framing.” The

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rationale for this procedure is precisely the underlying logic of classic deconstruction, which posits that the elements excluded in the analytical process form the conditions of its possibilities. Thus the exclusions or marginalization of certain writings in fact frame the conditions of existence of those other writings that are included or endorsed by the analytical process. “Framing always sustains and contains that which, by itself, collapses forthwith” (36). In this sense “ethnic minority writing” might be said to “frame” Australian literature (hence the title of my 1994 book). The discussion of the frame might be perceived as a variation on (or adjunct to) the concept of the supplement, which had proved helpful for those interested in theorizing a legitimate place and role for marginalized or minority cultural productions (Gunew 1994). But what is also clear is that the emphasis on spatial metaphors excluded considerations of the temporal, and this issue has to some degree been addressed in this book. To return to the statement by Leonie Kramer, have these immigrants and their descendants made a lasting impact on the institutionalization of Australian literature? Laurie Hergenhan’s bicentennial publication The Penguin New Literary History of Australia carried several entries under “migrant writing” (but did not employ the term multicultural substantively), and Bruce Bennett’s chapter included discussion of the phenomenon. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (Webby) published in 2000 considered immigrants and ethnic minority writings, but nine years later in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (Pierce 2009), these elements had disappeared. In that same year Nicholas Jose produced the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (plus DVD) that included quite a few contemporary Indigenous writers but surprisingly few non-​Anglo-​Celtic ones (Indyk 2009). It is difficult to know how to assess this history. Some might argue that national literatures have receded in the face of a new internationalism or transnationalism (Ashcroft 2011; Deacon, Russell and Woollacott 2008) produced by globalization. Within literary theory in general we have seen the rise of new frameworks to do with transculturalism (as in Sissy Helff’s essay in Mycak and Sarwal 2010) and new versions of cosmopolitanism (Papastergiadis 2012). In relation to multilingualism, attention is being paid in the burgeoning field of life writing in particular (Deacon, Russell and Woollacott 2008; Pajalic and Divaroren 2014; Pung 2008) and, as well, in the anthologies of Australian studies being produced outside Australia (Mycak and Sarwal 2010; Sarwal and Sarwal 2009; Wang and Carter 2010). This book has attempted to argue, using examples from across the world (but all in English or available in English translation), that neo-​cosmopolitan discussion that includes the interventions of all those from “outside”—​immigrants, asylum seekers, Indigenous peoples—​have distended the Anglophone sphere

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so that it is no longer recognizable as a monolingual paradigm without considerable effort and obfuscation. Arguing for such proliferations supports as well the notion of literature as a proactive force within globalization and is central to Pheng Cheah’s new book: “The world is not an indivisible whole, a closed totality. It is divided into at least three, simultaneously: audience, subject of a story, and teller. What narrates or gives the world’s story to itself is the gift of time. The gift, however, does not come from a presence beyond but inheres in the world. It constitutes the world by repeatedly dividing and opening it up. […] It is transformed and transforms itself in the telling precisely because it is fractured by the gift of time and cannot enclose itself as a sovereign whole […] postcolonial world literature’s normative task is to enact the unending opening of a world as a condition for the emergence of new subjects in spite of capitalist globalization. Its non-​utopian promise is that we can belong otherwise” (2016, 308–​309). I have also found it helpful to compare the situation in Canada and Australia, the two settler colonies that have been my home for 45  years of teaching. Canadian post-​multicultural writing is thriving within the fields of Black Canadian, Asian Canadian and Indigenous Canadian literary studies, and a great deal of discussion and publication has augmented what Canadian literature is seen to encompass now. As I’ve argued throughout this study, it helps to invoke the future anterior Backwards we turn we turn backwards measure our failures with infinite patience re-​imagine the times. (Kefala 2016, 74) Uncle Willy was from my mother’s side of the family and ended up in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. His memoirs and many other papers glower at me in a corner of my study. Having recently read Tim Bonyhady’s evocation of his family in Vienna,17 I worry that my own family’s narratives (when I come to assemble them) would perhaps have a more abject form (there are no precious objects and artifacts to anchor those remembered lives—​alas) but the idea that they, alongside many others, could pierce the monoculturalism and monolingualism of Australian letters continues to animate my work.

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NOTES

Introduction: The World at Home: Post-​Multicultural Writers as Neo-​cosmopolitan Mediators 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12 1 3 14 15 16

An exception is Nikos Papastergiadis’s recent text Cosmopolitanism and Culture. See Cheah (2016). My thanks to Arianna Dagnino (2015), who alerted me to these scholars and debates. The term migritude is Shailja Patel’s inspired coinage. My thanks to Susan Gingell for alerting me to her work. In this regard, see Pheng Cheah’s introduction to Cosmopolitics, where he situates both Kant and Marx within their differing European contexts. Kant’s cosmopolitanism was meant to reign in the absolute monarchs rather than help build nationalism (Cheah 1998a). For example, toward more cellular modes of representation, something Schoene associates with the work of Hardt and Negri (2009, 27). For an excellent example, see Ahmad (2014). Pollock (2002) also points out the very different histories of vernacularization in Europe and South Asia as a way of warning against the reification of either “vernacular” or “cosmopolitan.” For further discussion of the “minor, major” dynamic, see the work of Avtar Brah (1996), Cartographies of Diaspora, particularly chapter 8. One must remember that not all nationalisms are created equal and an emergent nationalism striving for independence is a very different dynamic from an established nationalism (Calhoun 2007). But see Imogen Tyler’s critique of abject cosmopolitanism as ignoring its material embodiments in ways that preclude agency (2013). The fact that Pascale Casanova (2004) imagines a Francophone center for her analysis of world literature makes a huge difference to her mapping of this phenomenon. In Derrida’s (1976) sense of a link that is also a break. A prime example of such a “multicultural” writer is recent Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. See Chapter 2. In Canada, an officially bilingual nation, the dominant language system includes French and so is never simply monolingual. For example, the fourth-​generation Indian writers in English mentioned by B. Ghosh as “acting as cultural translators who cater for a global market for world Englishes” (2004, 50).

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1. Who Counts as Human Within (European) Modernity? 1 See, for example, the development of such useful concepts as “abject cosmopolitanism” coined by Peter Nyers (2003) in his study of the possibilities for agency associated with refugees and asylum seekers, influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of disposable people. 2 See Vanuska http://​quarterlyconversation.com/​citizen-​of-​literature-​dubravka-​ugresic. My thanks to Margery Fee for drawing my attention to this resource. 3 See the special issue I  edited of Feminist Theory 8.2 on “Rethinking Whiteness” (Gunew 2007). 4 As exemplified by the contemporary razor wire fences Hungary has constructed to keep out Syrian (and other) refugees. 5 Ulrich Beck warns against this in his “Cosmopolitan Manifesto.” As he states, “the more neo-​liberal politics on a global level succeeds […] the more likely a ‘cosmopolitan façade’ arises which legitimizes western military intervention” (1998, 3). 6 The text was first published in 1818 and revised in 1831. 7 It is not simply a term that can be consigned to the past. See, for example, Kymlicka (2007). 8 See Chapters 2 and 3. 9 This differs in various parts of the world. For example, Will Kymlicka’s 2007 book argues once again for the importance to Canada of acknowledging the celebratory aspects of a long history of multiculturalism, including its state-​managed versions. 10 As Arjun Appadurai puts it, “the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics” (1996, 36). 11 In Canada, Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) have developed and extended comparable arguments. 12 What has been called the “unfinished business” with the Australian Aborigines continues to surface in the wake of the Mabo and Wik High Court decisions recognizing native title (Bartlett 1993; Perrin 1998) and following a report on the “stolen generations” (the tragedy of Aboriginal children removed from their families). 13 This is also very much the line Himani Bannerji (2000) takes in her critique of Canadian multiculturalism as a direct legacy of the colonial struggle between the English and French. 14 See also Alistair Pennycook (1998), particularly the last chapter. 15 This topic has been explored in Canadian fiction, for example, SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe where Chinese and First Nations relationships are represented. More recently, such concerns are also being addressed in Australian material: see the work of Peta Stephenson (2003) and Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo’s (2003) work on Australasian theatre and cosmopolitanism. 16 See, for example, Fee (2015). 17 In the Canadian case, “English” would include the Scots, though not the Irish, at least initially. See Driedger (1987). 18 These speculations permeate as well her account of traveling through Eastern Europe in the 1980s before the fall of the Soviet Empire. Note in particular the section “Where does Europe end?” (Kostash 1993, 72ff). 19 The term NESB (non-​English-​speaking background) is peculiar to the Australian context and appears in many policy documents. There is also the newer Australian acronym CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse). 20 Another contemporary exploration of Australia’s entrenched monolingualism and monoculturalism is Besmeres and Wierzbicka (2007), particularly their introduction.

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2 1 See also Daniel Coleman (2006). 22 For the very different response of two writers to this debate, see Slavenka Drakulic’s Café Europa (1996) and Eva Hoffman’s “The New Nomads” (1999). 23 The recent Brexit vote confirms that this is a two-​way street. 24 In relation to whiteness debates in Australia, see Moreton-​Robinson (2004). 25 Numerous commentators have stated that thinking of IS as representing Islam is like saying the Ku Klux Klan represents Christianity. 26 I am referring here to my argument in Haunted Nations where I  contend that “European” and “white” acquire meanings within specific histories of colonial settlement (Gunew 2004). 27 This history is also a dominant motif in Elizabeth Kostova’s wonderful rewriting of the Dracula story in The Historian. 28 Note in this respect Robert Manne’s (2005) review of the book. 29 See also the important work of Lebanese Canadian film critic and video artist Jalal Toufic (2002). My thanks to Mireille Astore for introducing his work to me. 30 It might be productive to see this work in terms of recent studies on mourning and melancholia (e.g., Anling Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race, 2001), as well as the “transmission of affect” (Teresa Brennan 2004) in relation to intergenerational shame. 31 See Chaudhuri (2015). 32 While there has been some work regarding “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham 2009), it has been more difficult to find that concept extended to “everyday cosmopolitanism,” although this may be changing. See, for example, Robert Dixon’s notion of a “situated cosmopolitanism” (2004).

2. Vernacular Cosmopolitans 1 See also the work of Shuh-​mei Shi, who distinguishes between the vernacular and metropolitan versions of cosmopolitanism where the former challenges the elitism of the latter and functions both intranationally and globally, in relation to countries that are perceived as marginalized (2007, 170ff.). For example, Shih’s work focuses on Taiwan. 2 Even though she wrote after the devastations of the Holocaust were well known, Manning displays vestiges of a uniquely British version of anti-​Semitism. 3 See also Williams (2013, 20–​26), for a discussion of the term. 4 There is a fascinating reversal of an Indian writer imagining Bulgaria in German Bulgarian author Iliya Troyanov, whose novel The Collector of Worlds, based on the travels of Richard Burton, constructs an image of India, among other places in the world. 5 See Williams (2013, 104–​106). My thanks to Mike Hanne (University of Auckland) for letting me know about Williams’s fine study. 6 Such confidence reminds one of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) study of Kafka’s German in Prague—​constituting a minor literature. 7 Kristeva’s influential text Strangers to Ourselves (1991) has been called to task for its lack of historical specificity (e.g., Bjelic), but the structures of psychoanalysis Kristeva invokes work quite well when applied to specific periods and places, for example, her timely reminder that cosmopolitanism can be either libertarian or totalitarian (1991, 61). See also Braidotti’s concept of the nomad in which she distinguishes among exile (sense of loss), migrant (caught in between) and nomad (resisting assimilation) (1994, 24–​25). 8 My translation, as are subsequent passages unless otherwise indicated.

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9 One of her few books translated into English and thus rushed into a further print run with the announcement of the Nobel Prize. 10 One could speculate that the see-​sawing between an adult’s and a child’s eye point of view is a possible allusion to the discredited East German writer Christa Wolf, whose A Model Childhood (Kindheitsmuster) became a paradigmatic tale of growing up in Nazi Germany. 11 See, for example, the work of Nigel Thrift (2008). 12 For a list of writings published by Kefala, see Karalis and Nickas (2013). In addition, see her recent volume of poems, Kefala (2016). 13 See also chapter 7 in Spivak’s Other Asias for a history of the term. Note also her comment, “We are looking here at problematizing […]the identitarianism that has been a largely unintended consequence of Orientalism and postcolonial criticism” (2008, 235). 14 My thanks to Jessica Main, who alerted me to the controversial nature of this critic. An assessment may be found at http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2011/​entries/​ watsuji-​tetsuro/​ (accessed January 2016). 15 See Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in a new translation www.crockford.com/​wrrrld/​wilkins.html (accessed January 2016). This story is cited in Bismarck (2002, 76) and Engberg (2010, 78), and both come to it via Foucault’s preface to The Order of Things. 16 If one is attempting to link abjection to subaltern cosmopolitan, then the immediate charge is that this is an oxymoron along the lines of Spivak’s speaking subaltern or the comment I received from my Australian colleague Ghassan Hage on hearing me attempt to make a case for multicultural writers, inescapably marginalized, as being subaltern cosmopolitan mediators. How can they be considered subaltern, was his point, when they have access to the cultural capital of literature? Certainly we can have the depiction of subaltern abjection as in Rey Chow’s analysis of a John Yau story in The Protestant Ethnic, where her conceptualization of ethnic hybridity as intrinsically abject (2002, 148) results in a framework that robs the “protestant ethnic” of agency. 17 There appears to be a comparable attention to the affective charge of objects in contemporary curatorial museum practices, for example, see Schamberger et al. (2008). 18 My gratitude to Xin Huang for alerting me to the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition of Fiona Tan’s work Fiona Tan:  Rise and Fall (2009a), leading me to embark on this exploration. 19 Jacqueline Lo suggests that Tan’s representation of herself as a professional foreigner allows her to disrupt identitarian categories associated with older models of multiculturalism (2014, 58). 20 This took place in Norway, Japan and Sydney. Tan asked people to send in their family snapshots (many thousands) and then grouped and displayed them according to certain recurrent motifs. 21 Benedict Anderson speaks of classificatory systems such as the census as an important part of the arsenal of the colonial endeavor. See ­chapter  10, “Census, Map, Museum,” in the revised 1991 edition of Imagined Communities. 22 Tan notes that she consulted both Said’s Orientalism and Buruma and Margalit’s Occidentalism as part of her research for this work (2009, 23). 23 It would take a great deal of research to source the “modern” material, including footage from May You Live in Interesting Times (1997) that is inserted into the section dealing with Java.

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2 4 I have written about Fleming in relation to another film. See Gunew 2009. 25 In a reversal of Tan’s lineage, Fleming’s father is an Anglo-​Celtic Australian, whereas her mother is one of the daughters of Long Tack Sam.

3. The Serial Accommodations of Diaspora Writings 1 The Sapir-​Whorf theory is usually wrongly oversimplified to convey the idea that deep-​structure language produces and governs thought—​thus linguistic determinism. However, it also encompasses the idea of linguistic relativity, i.e., the relationship between language and thought varies in different language systems (Payne 1997, 562ff.). 2 See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903. 3 See Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” first published in 1984. 4 For an excellent discussion of how “cultural capital” works in cultural theory, see Frow (1995). 5 Safran reiterates this case in “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas” (2004). 6 See Sudesh Mishra (2006, 43–​49). 7 Another example: the international Chinese students in various countries who formed a diaspora after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. 8 See Chapter 4. 9 The hailing of a subject is undertaken by an authoritative figure supported by institutional power, for example, a policeman or someone carrying out an official task such as a judge, a doctor or a teacher (Althusser 1984, 48ff.). Althusserian interpellation is central, for example, to Canadian critic Lily Cho’s (2007) analysis of diasporas. 10 The last two categories represent further attempts to dislodge the privileged position assigned to the nation-​state. Such decentering also occurs in the virtual dimension, and the penumbra of virtual networking is now a considerable presence in sustaining diasporan communities. My thanks to Terri Tomsky for alerting me to this element. 11 See Gunew (2004), for a discussion of these dynamics. It is also a reminder that Kant spoke about Besuchsrecht (visiting rights) as being distinct from Weltbürgerrecht (world citizen rights). 12 See Gunew (1982/​3). More than a decade after I wrote this essay, Yasmine Gooneratne expressed similar concerns (1996a). 13 See Gunew (2008) for a discussion of how these mechanisms work. 14 For example, there is a popular and much-​screened television series (beloved by teachers) titled A Scattering of Seeds (52 episodes) that draws attention to the “success stories” of Canadian multiculturalism. See www.whitepinepictures.com/​seeds/​index.html (accessed January 6, 2016). 15 See Kandiyoti (1994) and Yuval-​Davis (1997) for further discussion of these complex issues. 16 Vijay Mishra explores diaspora in these terms (2007, 7–​10). 17 Affect theory could be described as an attempt to analyze and theorize the complex field of emotions and the ways in which they shuttle between private and public realms, between biology and abstract philosophical categories. See, for example, book-​length studies of affect by Ahmed (2004), Brennan (2004), Clough (2007), Massumi (2002). See also Gunew (2009). 18 Both Rashkin (1992) and Cheng (2001) discuss generational guilt. 19 See B. Ghosh for a discussion of the roles of expatriates in diasporas (2004, 58–​61).

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20 Many critics have noted the contradiction in Althusser’s concept in the sense that he argues that this first hailing establishes the subject; in other words, something must already be in place to respond to this hailing and where does this something come from? It might make more sense to imagine the subject as a subject-​in-​process, to use Julia Kristeva’s term (1991, 103–​105). 21 See my critique of Rey Chow’s influential notion of ethnic abjection (Gunew 2005). Imogen Tyler (2013) and Peter Nyers (2003) discuss “abjective agency” in further and differing ways. 22 Disidentification is a term in psychology that cultural critic José Esteban Munoz (1999) has taken up in relation to racialized bodies. In other words, it signals a disconnection between bodies marked in particular ways and an individual’s refusal to identify with the meanings assigned to these markings. 23 Partition is also evoked as almost a visceral or genetic memory in Gooneratne’s text (2006, 568). 24 On her honeymoon visit back to India in 1984, Badami describes the following, “Then, in a town called Modinagar, we saw a Sikh man who had been burned to death being tossed over a low bridge by a group of thugs. A silence descended on all of us in the bus; we were shocked and full of shame that we had been helpless witnesses to such horror” (2006, Book Notes 3). The novel is dedicated to the memory of the man on the bridge and to the victims of the Air India disaster. 25 For an account of this incident, see Waraich and Sidhu and Ali Kazimi’s compelling documentary Continuous Journey (2004). 26 The Japanese Redress movement is set out in Miki (2004). One of those internees was well-​known ecologist David Suzuki (1987), who recounts the formative childhood experience in his memoirs. For more on the Komagata Maru, see Mawani (2012). 27 Mootoo revisits the territory of queer subjectivity in the Indo-​Caribbean diaspora in her complex novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008a), in which a young woman struggles to find her own sexual coordinates in the face of the repressed psychological legacy of a homosexual father. 28 In Gooneratne’s text there is a memorable scene where staid Sri Lankans are animated by the dance legacies of the Spanish and Portuguese forms known as baila and kaffringa (2006, 196ff.). 29 Neloufer de Mel’s essay argues that English-​language writing is not supported in Sri Lanka, and this suggests that a text like Gooneratne’s finds its major audience in the Anglophone spheres outside Sri Lanka. 30 The civil war in Sri Lanka began in 1983 and concluded in 2009. For one account, see Roy (2009). 31 The Tamils of the northern part of the island derive their origins from the Jaffna kingdom of 2 BCE, and the indentured laborers were brought from India to work on the tea plantations in the nineteenth century. Further complications suggest that the dominant Sinhalese also derived their ancestry from India 12,000 years ago. 32 This appears to be based on personal experiences. See Relative Merits (1986, 111, 114). 33 Readers may be familiar with this territory through Canadian authors Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), Shyam Selvaldurai’s Cinnamon Gardens (1998) and Australian writers Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003) and Siri Ranawake’s Time & Chance (2005). 34 The language issue is also discussed to comic effect in The Pleasures of Conquest (Gooneratne 1996), a novel set on the mythic island of Amnesia.

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35 Compare this incident (Gooneratne 2006, 624ff.) to a similar passage in Relative Merits (Gooneratne 1986, 213). 36 Fortier 2008 is one such study.

4. Indigenous Cosmopolitanism: The Claims of Time 1 US cultural critic Rey Chow refers to this logic as the “difference revolution” (2002). My thanks to Brendan McClure for alerting me to Sean Kicummah Teuton’s essay. 2 Agamben’s notion of “bare life” can be usefully invoked here—​those not even worth sacrificing. See Agamben (1998). 3 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of this concept. 4 In a recent essay, Alison Ravenscroft contrasts the ways in which this moment of mimicry is represented in other Australian writings and in Scott’s novel (2014, 64–​73). 5 Macaulay’s infamous essay may be found in full at www.columbia.edu/​itc/​mealac/​ pritchett/​00generallinks/​macaulay/​txt_​minute_​education_​1835.html (accessed January 2016). 6 For a comprehensive discussion of “country” in this context, see Brigita Olubas and David Gilbey, eds. “Country” (Special Issue) Journal for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol. 14: 3 (2014). 7 I am currently particularly concerned about these matters because after many decades of attempting to create an archive for the writings of non-​Anglo-​Celts in Australia (both in English and other languages), I  find that these projects have encountered severe obstacles and that the library charged and funded with collecting this material has uttered a kind of symbolic cri de coeur in relation to the books entrusted to it by gluing the “surplus” into its staircases. Gluing books into the wall represents a particular kind of commemorative mausoleum practice or possibly just a variation on book burning. 8 Santanu Das writes a moving account of the ways in which the war also claimed the lives of many (forced) recruits from the British Empire—​Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders who were catapulted into the European theatre of war, voyaging, in his evocative phrase, “to the heart of whiteness” (2014, 48). 9 See also Silva (2007). 10 My thanks to Dina Al-​Kassim for alerting me to the work of the “Afro-​Pessimists.” See www.incognegro.org/​afro_​pessimism.html (accessed January 2016). 11 See Bringing them Home:  The Stolen Children Report (1997) at www.humanrights.gov. au/​publications/​bringing-​them-​home-​stolen-​children-​report-​1997 (accessed January 2016). 12 For the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation, Canada process, see www.trc.ca/​ websites/​trcinstitution/​File/​2015/​Findings/​Calls_​to_​Action_​English2.pdf (accessed January 2016). The detailed findings have been published in six volumes. 13 See Borrows (2010), c­ hapter 15, “Windigos” (216–​227). My thanks to Margery Fee for alerting me to his work. 14 In his analysis of comparative Indigenous legal frameworks in Canada and Australia, John Borrows has a chapter (12. Iskugaewin) in which the distinctions are conveyed via stories that involve the collaboration of Nanabush and Dingo, an equivalent trickster figure in Australian Indigenous knowledge (2010, 169–​186). For more on the trickster figure in Canadian contexts and debates in relation to Indigenous writing, see the collections edited by Reder and Morra (2010, 2016).

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15 Spivak invokes the “planetary” as well in the final chapter of her Death of a Discipline (2003, 71–​102). 16 Spivak is at pains to point out that she is not speaking for Islam, but merely trying to conceptualize a different ethical relationship from those traditionally associated with arguing for “human rights.” 17 This brings to mind Mel Chen’s notion of “animacy,” deriving from linguistics, where rocks and other forms of the posthuman also have agency. See Chen (2012). 18 Helen Gilbert (citing the work of Nigel Clark) makes an important argument for “vertical” as distinct from “horizontal” mobility (2013). 19 Alexis Wright (2006). For those unfamiliar with her text, here is a summary from the publisher’s website: “an epic set in the Gulf country of north-​western Queensland, from where her people come. The novel’s portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, farce and politics. The novel teems with extraordinary characters […] figures that stride like giants across this storm-​swept world.” www. giramondopublishing.com/​fiction/​carpentaria/​ (accessed January 2016). 20 See also Ng (2013).

5. The Cosmopolitanism in/​of Language: English Performativity 1 For example, consider the following: “Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit intellectual, activist and a bit of a maverick, has for several years been trying to promote fluency in English as the key to the liberation of the people at the bottom of India’s caste system from what he sees as the caste prejudice inherent in Indian languages like Hindi. He usually hosts a party on October 25, the birthday of Lord Babington Macaulay, the man who got the Raj authorities to adopt English as the language of higher education in India (he also drafted the 1860 penal code that India still uses today). Many Indians criticize Lord Macaulay for creating, in his words, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,’ to act as native interpreters between the British and India’s multitudes. He was fairly successful and even today many of India’s upper classes think and write in English. For decades some Indian intellectuals have wondered (often in English) how to gain the standing for other Indian languages that English—​and those educated in English—​have. Mr. Prasad has no time for such concerns. Today he is presiding over the laying of a foundation stone for a temple dedicated to ‘Goddess English’ in a village in Uttar Pradesh state, about 350 kilometers east of New Delhi. He hopes the temple will be completed by Lord Macaulay’s birthday” (Tripti Lahiri: A Dalit Temple to “Goddess English.” April 30, 2010. http://​blogs.wsj.com/​indiarealtime/​ 2010/​04/​30/​a-​dalit-​temple-​to-​goddess-​english/​ (accessed February 2016). 2 See Shapin for an account of the ways in which English has taken over as the primary model of communication in science worldwide as well. 3 Deleuze and Guattari (1986) famously linked their study to Kafka’s use of German in Prague; thus their contention that a major language is deterritorialized by a minor literature.

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4 As my Canadian colleague Margery Fee has pointed out to me: “Canada is not a bilingual culture, where everyone or most people are bilingual, it is an officially bilingual state at the national level (and in one province, New Brunswick) with some cultural areas where bilinguals are commonplace (mainly Montreal, and mainly English to French bilinguals as well as those who start with Greek, Italian and learn French and English to become trilingual.) […] true bilinguals are relatively rare in Canada, even inside Quebec” (Fee, private communication). It is also interesting here to consider the role of the oral/​acoustic. Derrida spends a lot of time registering the accent as a sign of impurity within one’s mother tongue. The irony is that the Australian accent in this logic marks it permanently as impure English within global English, but this does not translate into tolerance for other accents within Australia itself. The next chapter examines accents in writing further. 5 The term weird does not do the author any favors and to some extent trivializes the field Ch’ien is trying to evoke. 6 There is also the question of melancholic relations to the old language. Ch’ien refers to melancholia, but one thinks as well of Anlin Cheng’s (2001) extended study (The Melancholy of Race) around the mechanisms of psychoanalytical melancholia and racialized grief. In relation to this chapter, one might imagine the first language as encrypted in the body and providing resistance to assimilation. This aspect was also considered in the second chapter in relation to Kyo Maclear’s work. 7 It is also the case that in his referencing of Khatibi’s (1990) work Derrida’s study Monolingualism (1998) does not spend time analyzing the fact that this text is titled Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages). My emphasis. 8 Ouyang Yu maintains that he uses both names and neither is a first name or surname (direct communication). 9 See also “White Peril: bai huo” (in Ouyang Yu 2007, 129–​134). 10 The range and diversity of such wordplay are explored even further in Ouyang’s book of essays, On the Smell of an Oily Rag (2007). 11 These “rants” that punctuate the text bring to mind Dina Al-​Kassim’s analysis of the literary rant, drawing on Foucault’s concept of parrhesia (fearless speech). The rant is a genre generated by those without power who are not legitimated to speak. In Al-​ Kassim’s words: “Radically dependent upon a particular history of injury, the rant’s abject appeal flows from and indeed fosters the singularity of a speech that is imbricated and embedded in subjection” (2010, 10). 12 Gene’s “rant” brings to mind other such texts emanating from migrant or multicultural or ethnic writers such as Ania Walwicz’s (1989) much-​anthologized prose poem “Australia” or much of the work of Π.O. (Pi.O. 1996). 13 For more on the vagaries of the translation, process see Humes (2009). 14 Humes points out that the novel makes no mention of the presence of Islam, or, indeed, the presence of male Uyghurs (2009). 15 For more on the Cultural Revolution, see Dikötter (2016). For a revealing interview with Wang Gang on the impact of the Cultural Revolution in relation to the novel: https://​vimeo.com/​6696788 (accessed September 2016). 16 The relationship is a reversal of the implications in the term sleeping dictionary—​a colonial term meant to show how male colonials acquired the local language through their sexual relationships with local women. An illustration is the 2003 film The Sleeping Dictionary (Jenkin). In Guo’s text, the sleeping partner provides the female protagonist

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with expertise in English and exhibits a galling lack of interest in learning her language. My thanks to Margery Fee for alerting me to this term. 17 Wenche Ommundsen (2008) has made a case for interpreting Guo’s text in light of the genre of Chick Lit that was dominant in the first decade of the new millennium, but it is debatable whether this term carries continuing heuristic value. 1 8 This reminds me of the prevailing belief during my own schooling in the 1960s in Australia that the children of postwar immigrants were encouraged to divest themselves as rapidly as possible of their distracting knowledge of other languages and to settle for monolingualism—​English alone.

6. Acoustic Cosmopolitanism: Echoes of Multilingualism 1 My interest in the role of the acoustic was also a topic in my earlier book. See Gunew (2004), ­chapter 4. 2 Related to this, I have often wondered why people read out quotations in PowerPoint presentations. 3 Shades of John O’Grady writing as Nino Culotta’s We’re a Weird Mob, the quintessential example of the stage migrant in Australian literature, a stereotype satirized in the work of performance poets such as Π.O. (1996) and Ania Walwicz (1982, 1989). 4 See, for example, my discussion of Mootoo’s work in ­chapter 3. 5 For more on Chinook (or Wawa), see Lang (2014). 6 For parallel examples in relation to German and Turkish, see Yildiz (2012). 7 See the excellent analysis on multilingualism and performativity in Trezise (2011). 8 Or is it more a case of specific languages spawning anxiety as in the fear generated by (supposed) Arabic? 9 See, for example, the discussion of philoxenia/​hospitality in the conversation Tsiolkas has with Nikos Papastergiadis in the Journal of Intercultural Studies (Papastergiadis 2013). 10 In relation to this point, see Yildiz’s discussion of German Turkish writer Feridun Zaimoglu in relation to the idea of resisting the use of supposedly mother-​tongue words in writings by second-​or third-​generation ethnic writers (2012, 182ff.). 11 For another example of the continuing blindness to ethnicity, see Lamond (2013). 12 Bensmaia’s approach reminds me of Steven Kellman’s discussion of the “calque,” “thinking in one language but employing the locutions of another” (2000, 10). 13 Castro explains the historical basis for this plot device—​that it was part of an attempt to “ethnically cleanse” Australia of Chinese (Brun 2011, 29). 14 Ghassan Hage’s productive image of “ethnic caging” in Australian culture is pertinent here (1993). 15 See Ghassan Hage’s review (2014) of this debut novel.

Conclusion: Back to the Future and the Immanent Cosmopolitanism of Post-​Multicultural Writers 1 The videos (Gunew 1981a, 1982). This has further implications for were to some extent self-​reflexive examinations of the so-​called authenticity of two formats, the interview and the documentary. Since then, many films, ranging from the realist to the experimental, have dealt with multicultural hybridity (Blonski, 1993). 2 See www.aussieeducator.org.au/​education/​specificareas/​lote.html (accessed February 8, 2016).

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3 Anglo-​Celtic is a controversial compound in Australia, given the ways in which the battles between England and Ireland have been fought out symbolically in the Australian arena. Britain itself is divided culturally as a nation in which Welsh and Scottish claims need to be separated out (Nairn 1977). The designation Anglo-​ Celtic indicates not only a British-​derived culture based on the use of the English language, but also certain political and cultural institutions, and especially a tradition of education in “English studies.” Those who simply use the term Anglo or Anglocentric leave out the crucial Celtic component in Australian culture. Indeed, in Australia, dissidence has been synonymous to some degree with Irish working-​class and Catholic groups as in the case of folk hero “Ned Kelly.” Anglo-​Celtic indicates a prevailing cultural nostalgia that gestures toward an old country that is always either Britain or Ireland, and that characterizes the dominant ethnic groups. Indeed, the Celtic portion of the term indicates an efficient hijacking of Australian culture by the Irish, and much of what we think of as quintessentially Australian culture—​the laconic humor, the folk music and many canonical Australian writers—​derives from Ireland. 4 Initially even a third-​generation writer like Anna Couani was labeled a migrant writer because her name signaled her descent from Greek and Polish forebears. 5 See www.austlit.edu.au (accessed February 2016). 6 This is akin to repeated pronouncements by European leaders that “multiculturalism has failed.” 7 See Indyk (2016) for a review of recent work by Π.O. 8 See the discussions in the Introduction and Chapter 6. 9 Outrider appeared between 1984 and 1996. 10 www.austlit.edu.au/​specialistDatasets/​MW (accessed February 13, 2016). 11 While the bibliography was being compiled—​funded by the Australian Bicentennial Multicultural Foundation—​it formed the basis for the first comprehensive collection of multicultural literature in Australia. Work on the bibliography raised awareness that irreplaceable papers and manuscripts were being lost because there was no adequately coordinated institutional interest in them. The multicultural literature collection at Deakin University, in conjunction with the bibliography, was set up to form the base for future research into the different linguistic and cultural groups in Australia, particularly those originating in the nineteenth century. However, although I had set up a considerable fund ($90,000) to maintain this collection, I recently discovered that it is now no longer being made accessible and there appears to be scant information about what happened to this archive. 12 For further clarification, see Robert Young (2008). 13 Illuminating comparisons with Canada may be made with statements by writers in Hutcheon and Richmond (1990) and Kamboureli (1997). 14 The Demidenko debacle is often cited as a significant moment in the Australian culture wars. See Gunew (2004); Huggan (2007); Ommundsen (2007). 15 An example of the first is Owl Publishing, whose publisher, Helen Nickas, serves mostly the large Greek-​Australian community, whereas Ivor Indyk’s imprint, Giramondo, is interested more widely in contemporary and experimental writing. 16 See Blonski (1992) and Gunew and Rizvi (1994) for the importance of the federal arts funding institution the Australia Council for the Arts. 17 Bonyhady’s Australian text is in the tradition of Edmund de Waal’s texts (2010, 2015), which have acquired an international following.

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NAME INDEX

Ahmad, Dohra 99 Ahmad, Michael Mohammed 109 Althusser, Louis 56, 58 Anderson, Benedict 11 Appadurai, Arjun 20 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 28, 29, 30 Appignanesi, Richard 116 Ascherson, Neal 36 Ashcroft, Bill 120 Augé, Marc 99, 107 Badami, Anita Rau 53, 54, 57, 59–63 Balibar, Etienne 40, 42, 47 Bannerji, Himani 27 Beck, Ulrich 5, 6, 21 Benhabib, Seyla 33, 34 Benjamin, Walter 8, 101 Bensmaia, Réda 105 Benveniste, Emile 38, 87 Bhabha, Homi 7, 8, 11, 17, 33, 58, 74, 75, 86, 109 Borges, Jorge Luis 43 Borrows, John 79 Bourriaud, Nicolas 108 Brah, Avtar 25, 55, 56, 64 Braidotti, Rosi 59, 62, 69 Brand, Dionne 26, 112 Brathwaite, Edward 98, 101 Breckenridge, Carol 20 Brennan, Tim 4, 15, 31 Brewster, Anne 75 Brown, Garrett 25 Buruma, Ian 19 Butler, Judith 45 Cadena, Marisol de la 80 Calvino, Italo 47

Cappiello, Rosa 118 Castles, Stephen 26 Castro, Brian 4, 105–7 Cavarero, Adriana 98 Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-​Ming 88, 99 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 13, 72 Cheah, Pheng 5, 9, 43, 44–45, 47, 71–72, 81, 112, 121 Chen, Kuan-​Hsing 14, 43 Chow, Rey 55, 59, 97, 101, 102, 105 Chua, Beng Huat 14, 43 Clarke, Maxine Béneba 107–8 Clifford, James 55 Cohen, Robin 31, 55 Corkhill, Ann 115 Coronil, Fernando 19, 22, 28 Dasgupta, Rana 36–37 Daughtry, Martin 99 Deacon, Desley 120 Delanty, Gerard 5, 6 Delaruelle, Jacques 115 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 87, 102 Dell’oso, Anna-​Maria 116 Derrida, Jacques 17–18, 33, 34, 45, 46, 87, 89, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 119–20 Dimock, Wai-​Chee 81 Divaroren, Demet 120 Dixon, Robert 109 Du Bois, W. E. B. 38, 54 Eagleton, Terry 87 Eco, Umberto 88 El-​Zein, Abbas 109 Fanon, Frantz 11 Fleming, Ann Marie 51–52

152

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POST-MULTICULTURAL WRITERS AS MEDIATORS

Forte, Maximilian 16 Foucault, Michel 43 Freud, Sigmund 39, 45–46 Ghosh, Amitav 4, 9, 12–13 Gilbert, Helen 21, 82 Giles, Zeny 116 Gilroy, Paul 5, 8, 9, 12, 16, 33, 36, 39, 44, 80 Gooneratne, Yasmine 54, 66, 67–69 Gordon, Avery 24 Grace, Patricia 98 Guattari, Felix 4, 87 Gunew, Sneja 23, 113, 116, 117, 118 Guo, Xiaolu 93–94 Hage, Ghassan 57, 109, 114 Haines, Brigid 40 Hall, Stuart 9, 15 Hartman, Saidiya 76 Heidegger, Martin 71, 119 Hergenhan, Laurie 120 Highway, Tomson 77–79, 80 Houbein, Loló 117 Indyk, Ivor 117, 119, 120 Jameson, Fredric 34 Jose, Nicholas 120 Jupp, James 115, 116 Jurgensen, Manfred 117 Kant, Immanuel 6, 33, 119 Karakostas-​Seda, Alexandra 117 Kefala, Antigone 27, 41–42, 121 Kentridge, William 71 King, Thomas 77 Kostash, Myrna 25 Kramer, Leonie 120 Kristeva, Julia 38 Lacan, Jacques 39, 58 Laclau, Ernesto 6, 31 Lahiri, Jhumpa 111, 112 Lazarus, Neil 19, 20, 27, 28, 30, 31 Lo, Jacqueline 21, 50 Lopez, Mark 116 Loriggio, Francesco 26, 114 Loukakis, Angelo 116 Lyotard, Francois 3, 10, 108–9

Macaulay, Thomas 74, 96 Maclear, Kyo 45–47, 51 Mahyuddin, Jan 116, 117 Manning, Olivia 35–36 Margalit, Avishai 19 Mbembe, Achille 77 McCann, Andrew 103, 104 McLean, Ian 25 Mignolo, Walter 2, 4, 6, 13 Miki, Roy 45 Mishra, Sudesh 55, 63, 65 Mishra, Vijay 24, 55, 57, 59, 63, 64, 66, 69 Mohanty, Chandra 27 Montesquieu 8, 33, 80 Mootoo, Shani 54, 59, 63–65 Morrison, Toni 9 Müller, Herta 38–40, 42 Musa, Omar 109 Mycak, Sonia 115, 120 Nancy, Jean-​Luc 4, 7, 33, 98 Nava, Mica 31 Newfield, Christopher 24 Ng, Maria 54 Nikolchina, Miglena 110 Nussbaum, Martha 6 Nyers, Peter 7, 9 Ommundsen, Wenche 116, 118, 119 Orwell, George 9, 80 Ouyang Yu 17, 88, 89–90, 91, 95 Pajalic, Amra 120 Papaellinas, George 116 Papastergiadis, Nikos 119, 120 Perera, Suvendrini 2 Π.O 99–100, 116 Pollock, Sheldon 8, 33 Povinelli, Elizabeth 24 Pung, Alice 120 Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan 55 Ram, Kalpana 26 Rizvi, Fazal 115, 119 Robbins, Bruce 4 Rooney, Brigid 97 Roy, Arundhati 69 Rushdie, Salman 4 Russell, Penny 120

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Name Index 

Safran, William 55 Said, Edward 1, 27, 35, 38, 54 Sarwal, Amit 115, 120 Schoene, Berthold 4, 7, 11, 15 Scott, Kim 73–76, 77, 80, 81, 82 Shelley, Mary 21–23, 30 Silva, Denise Ferreira da 77, 80 Skrbis, Zlatko 7 Spencer, Robert 5 Spivak, Gayatri 1, 5, 14, 16, 21, 43, 45, 80 Stoker, Bram 29, 30 Tan, Fiona 43, 47–50, 51 Teuton, Sean Kicummah 72 Todorov, Tzvetan 19 Todorova, Maria 35 Tölölyan, Khachig 55 Tremain, Rose 36 Tsiolkas, Christos 29–30, 42, 102–5, 116 Ugresic, Dubravka 20, 26, 34–35, 37–38, 42

Vardoulakis, Dimitri 6 Vasta, Ellie 26 Vertovec, Steven 31 Viswanathan, Gauri 16, 86 Volney, Comte de 21 Walwicz, Ania 100, 118 Wang, Gang 91–93 Waten, Judah 118 Werbner, Pnina 33 Wiegman, Robyn 20 Wierzbicka, Anna 100 Woodward, Ian 7 Woollacott, Angela 120 Wright, Alexis 81–82 Xu, Ruiyan 94–95 Yildiz, Yasemin 100, 101 Young, Robert 16, 85, 86

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GENERAL INDEX

24 Hours 99–100 abjection 9, 22, 33, 36, 38, 45, 48, 55, 59, 72, 75, 77, 82, 103, 104, 121 Alien Son 118 anti-​Semitism 29–30 archives 47, 48, 50, 75–77 Asia 43, 45–52 asylum seekers 1, 2, 7, 9, 16, 25, 56, 72, 107–8, 120 Australia. Passim Asian immigrants 66–69 European immigrants 41–42 Indigenous people 73–77, 81–82 monolingualism vs. multilingualism 86, 88, 97–110 multiculturalism 23–25, 111–21 postcolonialism 24 racialization 25–26 Baby No-Eyes 98 Barracuda 102–4 Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-​Nagasaki and the Art of Witness 45–46 Benang 77 border 1, 4, 13, 27, 34, 51, 55, 80, 119 Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? 54, 57, 59–63 Canada. Passim French-​English divide 27, 101 immigrants 46–47, 60–64, 112 monolingualism vs. multilingualism 88 multiculturalism 57, 115, 121 postcolonialism 24 racialization 25, 26, 86 capitalism 1, 2, 6, 27, 36, 37, 71, 77, 81 Carpentaria 81–82

Changeling 47 Christianity 21, 22, 77–79 colonialism. Passim. See also imperialism; postcolonialism civilizing mission 36, 50, 96 decolonization 9, 72, 75, 80 Indigenous languages 17 neo-​colonialism 66 settler colonies 3, 14, 17, 20, 23, 24, 27, 30, 56, 98, 99, 121. See also Australia; Canada white guilt 29, 30, 31 Concise Chinese-​English Dictionary for Lovers 93–94 contrapuntal consciousness 55 cosmopolitanism. Passim neo-​cosmopolitanism 1–6, 13, 44, 81, 108, 109, 120 peripheral 7, 19–31 vernacular 7–10, 33–52, 72, 109 Dead Europe 29–30, 42 democracy 6, 9, 21, 31, 34, 65, 115 diaspora 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 23, 24, 29, 30, 53–69, 85, 108 Disorient 50 Diverse Inheritance 66 double consciousness 38, 54 Dracula 29, 30 English 91–93 English Class 87 English language 11, 16–17, 53, 85–110, 111–13, and passim englishes 3, 88, 98–99, 101 global 3, 4, 73, 86–88, 89, 90, 92, 95–96, 100 hegemony 73, 101

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POST-MULTICULTURAL WRITERS AS MEDIATORS

English language (cont.) monolingualism vs. multilingualism 3, 97–110, 111, 115, 118, 121 non-​English-​speaking background (NESB) 26, 38, 86, 113, 117 Europe 19–31 Balkans 35–36 as British/​French 23–26, 27 cosmopolitanism 28–31 Eastern Europe 34–42 Eurocentrism 6 as floating signifier 23–25 as metaphor 21–22 occidentalism 27–28 transnational capitalism 1 whiteness 20 European Union 1, 6, 19, 26, 34, 36, 37–38 “Facing Forward” 47 Frankenstein 30 “Fremde Blick” 38–39 fundamentalism 20, 31, 69 Garden Book 105–7 global vs. planetary 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 72, 80–81, 108 globalization 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 20, 21, 28–29, 44, 52, 56, 72, 80, 108, 109, 120, 121 neo-​imperial 3 Haunted Nations 23 He Drown She in the Sea 64 human rights 6, 44, 77 universal hospitality 33–34 “Imam and the Indian” 12–13 immigrants 5, 7, 15, 17, 50, 56, 108, 120 Asian 66 in Australia 23, 30, 38, 66, 67, 89, 113, 116, 120 European 26, 36 undocumented 9, 16 weird English 88 imperialism 2, 9, 12, 13, 16, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 71, 80 In an Antique Land 9

Indigenous people 3, 7, 9, 23, 25, 30, 106, 120 Australian 16, 24, 25, 97, 101, 120 Canadian 24 cosmologies 16 as cosmopolitans 16 languages 17, 18, 97, 98, 101 Native Americans 23 New Zealand 24 primordialism 23 relationship to place 56 temporality 71–83 Islam 1, 20, 21, 22, 27, 30, 80, 82 Islamic State 27 Kayang and Me 73 Kiss of the Fur Queen 77–79 Land of Green Plums (Herztier) 39–40 Lapse of Memory 48–49 Letter Opener 46–47 Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai 94–95 Magical Life of Long Tack Sam 51–52 Map to the Door of No Return 112 May You Live in Interesting Times 47, 49, 51 “migrant writers” 112, 114, 116, 118, 120 mimicry 17, 58, 74–75, 86 Ministry of Pain 37 modernism 10 mondialisation 7 multicultural anthologies Beyond the Echo: Multicultural Women’s Writing 117 Displacements: Migrant Writers 113 Displacements 2: Multicultural Storytellers 113 Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations 118–19 Telling Ways: Australian Women’s Experimental Writing 117 multiculturalism. Passim. See esp. post-​multiculturalism nationalism 2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 57, 99. See also English language: monolingualism vs. multilingualism affective 55

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General Index

vs. cosmopolitanism 20 cultural formations 5, 8, 10, 56, 116 homogeneity 58 myths 54 national literatures 7, 98, 120 primordialism 24 nation-​states 10, 11, 109 autonomy 11 citizenship 8 international regulation 5–6 sovereignty vs. human rights 33–34 neo-​cosmopolitanism. See under cosmopolitanism neoliberalism 5, 10, 28, 81 “New World” 100 New Zealand postcolonialism 24 occidentalism 19, 21, 23 “On Becoming an Indian Starboy” 64–65 orientalism 1, 19, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 31, 49 “Out on Main Street” 63 Outrider 117 Persian Letters 8, 33, 80 planetary. See global vs. planetary Playing in the Dark 9 postcolonialism 5, 8, 16, 24, 27, 50, 56, 72, 96, 98 belatedness 35 concept of the West 19, 20, 26, 27, 28 dialects 88 English language 100 identity 67 invention of English literature 86 nationalist myths 56 in the settler colonies 24 temporality 71

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postmodernism 10, 87 post-​multiculturalism 10–12, 14, 15, 17, 108–10, 114, 121 Provenance 48 psychoanalysis 57 racialization 25–26, 28, 44, 77, 81, 86, 105, 109 refugees 1, 7, 9, 25, 26, 55, 56, 72 Refusal of Time 71 Relative Merits 66, 67, 68 Road Home 36 Ruins of Empire 21 Sapir-​Whorf theory 53 Solo 36–37 “Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa” 107–8 subaltern 7, 8, 22, 29, 33, 45, 50, 76 “Sushila’s Bhakti” 63–64 Sweet and Simple Kind 67–69 Sydney Journals 41–42 That Deadman Dance 73–76 transculturalism 5, 18, 23, 120 United States slavery 24 universalism 5, 6–7, 9, 12, 13, 31, 55, 117 Vox Populi 47 War on Terror 19 What We All Long For 112 whiteness 20, 22, 23, 25–26, 28, 77 world literature 2, 4, 9, 11, 44–45, 72, 117, 121 “Writing Asia” 106

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