Disturbance of the White Man: Oriental Quests and Alternative Heroines in Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman

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    Abstract

    This article examines the “Oriental quest” theme and its exotic semiotics in the Filipino Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s novel Fish-Hair Woman (2012). The Oriental quest narrative typically features Asia as a redemptive locale for white, masculine figures to alleviate their identity crises. In its touristic form, the Oriental quest offers a controlling metaphor of cultural neocolonialism, whereby the white man’s self-analysis is parallelled by his interracial romance with objectified, consumable Asian women. In reading the novel’s metafictional and magical-realistic frame, I argue that Bobis adopts strategic exoticism to ironise the therapeutic promise of an Asian journey and portrays alternative heroines who act upon multiple desires. The novel’s complication of local-global encounters and modes of story-telling enunciates a transnational ethics of otherness based on empathy. This ethics reflects Bobis’s interstitial position as a diasporic-ethnic writer writing within and beyond the Australian literary environment.
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages17
    JournalJASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
    Volume16
    Issue number2
    Publication statusPublished - 2016

    User-Defined Keywords

    • Asian Australian
    • Merlinda Bobis
    • Fish-Hair Woman
    • Oriental quest
    • exoticism
    • magical realism
    • metafiction
    • the uncanny
    • transnational

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