Southeast Asian Australian women’s fiction and the globalization of “magic”

Abstract

This article discusses the evolution of magical realism in relation to the postcolonial by looking at three contemporary Australian women authors originating from Southeast Asia. Besides extending magical realism to the Australian and Southeast Asian regions, these authors show the contours of the literary mode to be flexible, as magical realism has moved from being a localized Latin American trend to assuming a significant status on the international market. Concomitantly, their fiction develops various forms of a postcolonial aesthetics of “home” – forms that are neither pure nor authentic, but always-already partial and complicit with orientalist practices, in particular in light of new fault lines opened up in the wake of decolonization. This is one reason why their fiction embraces magical realist modes of representation: as an ambivalent literary mode, straddling the “actual” and the “imaginary”, and situated in-between resistance to, and collaboration with, Eurocentric modes of representation, magical realism retains a strong political relevance in a globalized, postcolonial era.

Keywords:

• magical realism
• Southeast Asia
• hybridity
• globalization
• aesthetics
• Australia

Notes

1. This is the case with Pham, who was born in Tasmania of Vietnamese descent.

2. Literature Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison is clearly not the only dissenting voice to have emerged in the last two decades or so. Wendy Faris (2002) lists a substantial number of critics and writers for whom magical realism is at times too vague, too totalizing or too exoticizing.

3. Two cases of identity forgery in Australian literature are well known. The intense controversy around Ukrainian-born Helen Demidenko and Aboriginal writer Mudrooroo illustrates how notions of cultural authenticity, to the detriment of imaginative creativity, overdetermine readings of minority literatures.