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 language | English |
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Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 2 |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |
User-Defined Keywords
- Asian Australian
- Merlinda Bobis
- Fish-Hair Woman
- Oriental quest
- exoticism
- magical realism
- metafiction
- the uncanny
- transnational