Journal articles: 'Asian Canadian Women's Writing' – Grafiati (2024)

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This article reports on a practical writing workshop for Thai teachers of English in a rural Thai setting. The teachers were participants in a Certificate in TEFL course sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA and taught by the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, Regional Language Centre (SEAMEO RELC). The genre approach to teaching writing is proposed as a way of helping teachers look beyond structural elements like vocabulary, punctuation, and spelling. The social functions and language choices of three important genres of writing, Description, Anecdote, and News Item, are examined in the article. The principles and practices may be generalizable to similar situations, that is, places where English is taught as a foreign language.

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This article challenges public and private constructions of honourrelated violence as they impact second-generation South Asian women and girls in Canada. While much has been written about the victims of honour killings, including high profile cases of young women killed by their families in Canada, considerably less attention and space has been given to second-generation South Asian Canadian women and girl’s stories of survivance and resistance against honour-based violence (HBV). This paper moves towards storying processes of grieving and of witnessing public stories of HBV, and documents a collective writing process I undertook in collaboration with survivors of HBV. We shared narratives of grief and pain, and the power of collective storywork. The paper includes two letters that speak to the context in which second generation South Asian women are embodying resistance and reclamation, and witnessing stories of grief, loss, love, and acceptance.

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Canadian novels have witnessed a movement from description to more different analytical and interpretative directions. Margaret Atwood's oeuvres are belonged to the postmodern literary field of feminist writing. Her fictions show a severe alertness of the relationship between chains and slavery, i.e. between women's requirement for relationships with others and her requirements for freedom and autonomy. In this paper, The Handmaid's Tale, Bodily Harm, Surfacing, and The Edible Woman will be surveyed in a direct relationship between politics, violence and victimization of female protagonists. An examination on Margaret Atwood's novels demonstrates that she is pioneer in the dimension of time by being a revolter against the patriarchal society.

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PurposeThis writing examines the remarkable career of the founding East Asian scholar at Montreal's Concordia University. He was the individual who did more than merely a college professor after 37 years there. He had helped to shape a new course in Sino-Canadian relations.DesignThis paper will look at an element of soft power engagement between Canada and China before Deng Xiaoping's Open Door Policy. It also examines Concordia's achievement in establishing a China foothold in the early-1980s.FindingsCanada has always been a pioneer in engaging Red China. Despite not having formal diplomatic ties until October 1970, Ottawa never abandoned its wish to seek a friendship with Beijing. Amidst the thawing China–Canada relations since 1970, Concordia University recruited a 25-year-old graduate student named Martin Singer to inaugurate its East Asian courses. Singer's auspicious academic career not only gave him to organize Canada's first and the largest student delegation to China but also enabled him to pioneer the first joint-postgraduate studies program between a Chinese and a Western postsecondary institution. He was also a key player in establishing a novel and unique relationship between the PRC and the Western world.OriginalityThis paper provides a glimpse into China's early experience in engaging the world as it left behind decades of communist isolation. It also highlights how serendipities allowed people and institutions to advance in the wake of this exciting period in modern Chinese history.

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The Fire-Dwellers (1969) is one of the Manawaka series novels of Margaret Laurence. The novel was written at the time when women’s emancipation movements were gaining momentum, primarily in the United States, but in other parts of the world as well. So, clearly, the narrative is largely affected by women’s simmering discontent with their stagnant lives in Canada too. The novel reflects Canadian women’s desire to free themselves from the common drudgery at home and to be part of a more active populace working outside the home, themselves writing the rules of their lives. The woman protagonist in the novel, Stacey MacAindra, is a common housewife taking care of her husband and their four children. She feels she is happy keeping the societal values intact but suddenly feels frustrated realizing one day that she is the only one in her family whose existence in the family is only for others, while to everyone else in the family their lives are important for themselves, not for others. However, my reading of The Fire-Dwellers is that Margaret Laurence was not in total disregard of family values, or for complete independence of women from the patriarchal system as we see it in women's emancipation movements today.

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Abstract Clio in Canada today has notable strengths and weaknesses. Historiography itself has been greatly enriched as younger historians using better methods have opened up many new frontiers in labour, urban, Northern, and women's history, among others. As well, historians have had an important part in the flowering in many disciplines over the past decade of ethnic, regional, and Canadian studies-all leading to a fuller understanding of our heritage and nation. The last twenty years have seen a great expansion, too, in the numbers of historians, not only in the colleges and universities, but also among archivists (normally first trained in history) and government researchers (especially at the Department of National Defence and Parks Canada). As it approaches its sixtieth anniversary with well over two thousand members, the Canadian Historical Association itself is very healthy, a leader among learned societies in Canada and a strong force uniting far-flung historians through its annual meeting, its publications, and its defence of historians' interests, as in our recent representations in Ottawa regarding Bill C-43. But all is not well among Clio's Canadian disciples. Historians of countries other than Canada and especially francophone Quebeckers are still very much underrepresented in the CHA, despite laudable attempts to make the association more appealing to them. Our profession is more deeply threatened by attempts by the media through television soap operas and historical novels to equate history with a romantic popularization of the past, at the possible expense of reflective contemplation based on careful research and analysis. And if nineteenth-century historians too often came to history after a full career in public life, which led to obvious biases in their writings, do we now not risk the opposite extreme? Too many historians today are cold analysts removed from the world on isolated campuses, writing only for each other in specialized journals quite divorced from contemporary society. The natural critical capacity of historians — their training to take no evidence or information at face value — is too often lost in the affairs of the world. Despite our differences of temperament, ideology, subject fields, ages, and languages, we as historians in Canada are united in the belief that the past has more to teach us than the present. The lessons so gleaned we must make a source of wisdom for our contemporaries.

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In the context of the 2015 meeting of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa, Ontario, two academic associations––the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) and the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL)––hosted a collaborative event to honour the work of Ottawa-based poet Cyril Dabydeen. Cyril read from God’s Spider, which was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014.ACQL and CACLALS are grateful to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for their financial support of this event, and I am personally grateful to Dorothy Lane, then president of CACLALS, for her willingness to collaborate in order to bring the reading to fruition.As then Vice-President of ACQL, I was happy to introduce Cyril to a room full of scholars, writers, community members, and friends:“Born in Guyana, Cyril immigrated to Canada in 1970. His forty-five-year residence in Canada coincides neatly with the histories of both ACQL and CACLALS, both founded in the mid 1970s (1975 and 1973, respectively), and the coincidence speaks to the multiple ways in which Canada’s literary cultures have changed in the wake of Cyril’s arrival. Comprising a significant body of short stories, novels, and poetry, Cyril’s writing is particularly intriguing for its meditations on the intersections of Guyanese, Indian, and Canadian identities.As an anthologist, Cyril has also been an active shaper of literary culture: his Shapely Fire (an anthology of Black and Caribbean writing in Canada), Another Way to Dance (which collects the work of Asian poets in Canada), and Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today have been important tools in the teaching of an increasingly diverse selection of writers in Canadian classrooms and are key compilations of contemporary diasporic writing. In addition to his active career as a poet who is widely recognized for his contributions to Canadian and Caribbean writing, Cyril is also a teacher: he has taught creative writing here at the University of Ottawa for many years.”Jody MasonAssociate ProfessorDepartment of English, Carleton University

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When I think of 'flesh' at this moment in human history, it's difficult not to think of the images on television and in print news reports in recent weeks. The first pictures of Kosovo's Albanian population being purged from their homes and amassed on the borders of neighbouring countries have left an impression. While cameras have stood witness from afar, we have been confronted by images of people being shot at point-blank range. Rows of corpses have lined up after ill-executed bombing raids by NATO forces and the more systematic slaughter of pro-independence activists by wayward Indonesian military groups in East Timor. Perhaps less expected, the deaths of school students in Columbine, Colorado, and the patrons of a gay club in the Soho district of London have added force to daily reminders on the insistence of the flesh to being. The significance of flesh to being extends beyond a simple matter of physical survival. It is often our reaction to the flesh of the other upon which we stake our very sense of self. Subjectivity becomes a constant process of negotiating the borders of the self, where an individual may either identify with the other they encounter, or attempt to deny or repress the other's existence. The recent events around the world are illustrative of the attempt by some individuals to repress others, who (inadvertently) threaten their stable sense of self, by way of the very final solution of death. It is often a response to an irrational fear of the inescapable physical flesh of others in various manifestations, such as ethnicity, gender and sexuality, that provokes such violent actions. In view of the on-going perpetration of violence towards others, it is little wonder that fantasies of transcending the flesh abound in many narratives. The successes of William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1986, and now the currently-released film The Matrix are contemporary testaments to the ongoing popularity of this fantasy of human self-creation without the limits imposed by 'meat'. While it might be argued that the leap into cyberspace is a denial of the flesh, it might also be argued that emergent technologies are almost certainly embraced because they seem to offer the possibility of allowing us to be more human than we are currently. New technologies seem to offer new ways of being in the world that will refine human communication and diffuse prejudices, where you will be loved for your personality and not hated for the colour of your skin. In this issue of M/C we consider a variety of ways of thinking about the flesh amidst the effects of media and new technologies. The feature article by Sean Aylward Smith asks "Where Does the Body End?", and thus also, where does technology begin? Smith deliberates on the difficulty of working with and about technology, where common-sense suggests that one should be able to define the distinction between technology and the body before embarking on the study of "any given socio-technical imbroglio". Working through the philosophical writings of Felix Guattari, Bruno Latour and then Guattari again, this time in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze, Smith progressively confuses the apparently neat distinction between technology and the body to argue for a subjectivity, or rather "a mode of individuation" as a haecceity, where humans are "collective assemblages" of agencies and affects. Peter Chen undertakes his deliberation on flesh in terms of its existence on the Internet in the form of p*rnography. In "Community Without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999", Chen argues that in adapting existing regulatory paradigms to the Internet, the Australian government has overlooked the informal communities of the virtual world. He suggests that in attempting to meet a perceived social need for regulation with political and administrative expedience, the government has ignored the potentially cohesive role they might play in the development of self-regulating communities who require little government intervention to produce socially beneficial outcomes. Chen predicts the formation of a new type of community, "whose desire for a feast of flesh" will ensure they are vigilant in their evasion of the cast of the regulators' net. Alan Macdougall's article might offer some practical solutions for those members of the virtual communities of cyberspace discussed by Chen. In "'And the Word Was Made Flesh, and Dwelt amongst Us'": Towards Pseudonymous Life on the Internet", Macdougall engages in a critical discussion of pseudonymity on the Internet, where users construct untraceable identities for use online. While Chen identified the concerns private citizens have when governments implement modes of surveillance for online activities, Macdougall acknowledges the threat individuals also experience from commercial interests gathering demographic information. He iterates the emergent technologies that are being developed to counter such intrusions, and considers the ways in which this "new flesh" will dwell amongst us. Axel Bruns continues the discussion of the Internet, and concurs with Macdougall's assessment that while online activity may present itself as ephemeral, in fact it has a presence that produces very real effects. In a defense of the significance of online publishing and communication, Bruns asks "How Solid Is the Flesh?"; he wonders whether the solidity and therefore the esteem that is generally attributed to publications in the 'real world' is a convincing argument when many books and print journals languish unread on obscure library shelves. On the contrary, Bruns argues, the 'flesh' is not left behind when the leap is taken into cyberspace. The ongoing explosion in available storage space on the Internet has the effect that cyberspace is becoming increasingly anephemeral. In "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons" Simon-Astley Scholfield shifts our focus to a small screen of another kind in his consideration of the popular animated American 'kidult' cartoon series Ren and Stimpy and South Park. He notes that amid the uproar about the excessive depictions of violence and viscera in these comedy cartoons, an analysis of their representations of anal flesh has been conspicuously avoided. Scholfield's article addresses this oversight in a comparison between the two programmes. He concludes that while South Park explores subversive themes, "they have been twisted into misogynist and hom*ophobic contexts". In contrast, the narrative outcomes in Ren and Stimpy posit a challenge to the "dominant hom*ophobic culture". The 1997 spate of dead celebrities provides the flesh in Rebecca Farley's article, "The Word Made Flesh: Media Coverage of Dead Celebrities". Noticing the absence of pictures of dead celebrities' bodies in the coverage of their deaths, Farley wonders if when alive, celebrities fill a particular function, what do they do in death? Choosing to focus specifically on the deaths of Gianni Versace, Michael Hutchence and Mother Teresa, Farley argues that the sexually transgressive personae of Versace and Hutchence in life are replaced with "a pro-social narrative" that returns them to the bosom of family in death, while Mother Teresa, whose body "caused no trouble when it was alive, and conveniently wasn't mangled to death", is allowed to be present and photographed in death. Tseen Khoo's article, "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, p*rno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body" takes full advantage of the Internet to introduce the topic of flesh. Via a tour of various Websites, Khoo introduces the Web-surfer to the issues involved in representing the Asian body in diaspora, and the politically fraught issues for racial minority populations in majority 'white' nations. Khoo considers examples from Japanese-Canadian literature, metaphors of ingestion, and racial minority identity politics in the United States. The final submission to this issue is a work of creative writing by Hamish Kaden. "The Interminable Son" is the story of a man reconciling the death of his well-known feminist mother. The un-named character resurrects the memory of his mother through a Buddhist ceremony for the dead, and by conducting library research into her life as a prominent campaigner for women's right to have safe abortions. Kaden imparts the emotions of his character, while providing insight into an important health issue that effects many lives. This issue of M/C conceives of flesh in many forms and relationships. The cover image, designed by Damian Frost, should not go without mention as it provides a fresh vision from which to embark onto the smorgasbord of 'flesh'. Enjoy! Kirsty Leishman 'Flesh' Issue Editor Citation reference for this article MLA style: Kirsty Leishman. "Editorial: 'Flesh'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/edit.php>. Chicago style: Kirsty Leishman, "Editorial: 'Flesh'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Kirsty Leishman. (1999) Editorial: 'flesh'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

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From the sensuous scenes of culinary delectation and preparatory foreplay in Eat Drink Man Woman to the current crop of texts infused with metaphors of consumption as assimilation, writers and filmmakers have signified diasporic Asian bodies by merging cultural and racial markers. This is an introduction to the issues involved in representing the Asian body in diaspora and the politically fraught issues for racial minority populations in majority 'white' nations. Examples in this piece skim from Japanese-Canadian literature and metaphors of ingestion to racial minority identity politics in the United States. In Chorus of Mushrooms, a novel by Japanese-Canadian Hiromi Goto, one of the foci for the Tonkatsus' cultural change-over from the Japanese to the Canadian side of the hyphen is a determined alteration in eating habits. 'Western' food is the only type provided and the grandmother, Naoe, comments that her daughter has "converted from rice and daikon to weiners and beans" (13). In many ways, Keiko tries to force her family to eat their way into a new Canadian skin. Ostensibly, through the absorption of Western-style Canadian food, the Tonkatsus would achieve the goal of becoming one of 'them'. Using metaphors of cultural miscegenation, Keiko's daughter Muriel, as well as Obasan's Naomi and Stephen Nakane, could be described as 'banana'-yellow on the outside, white on the inside (Brydon 104). In the Asian-Australian literature and politics Webpages, The Banana Schtick, this term is reclaimed deliberately and defines specific issues for Asian-Australian writers and academic work which bypass the usual 'area studies' presumptions. This customarily derogatory metaphor is used by those within and without racial minority communities, across most class groups, barring the embedded invisibility of whiteness. Similar metaphors which denote the clashing (or possible melding) of races or cultures include the use of the term 'oreos' for African-Americans who take on what are deemed white, middle-class characteristics, or who do not act 'like a negro should' (Dyson 222). The term 'apples' has referred to Native Americans and 'coconuts' to individuals of South-East Asian or West Indian origin. The plethora of food metaphors link these models of hybrid identities with notions of cultural consumption and ingestion. Yau Ching, while examining Ang Lee's film Eat Drink Man Woman, observes: "those close-ups of the kungfu of chopping and stir-frying constitute a postmodern version of the West's Chinoiserie. I felt like I was stripteasing, selling something that I didn't have" (31). Yau's positioning as a part of the 'striptease' offered by the highly detailed shots of food preparation evokes discomfort. The scenes are meant to be evocatively 'Chinese' and operated as cultural shorthand: "food thus serves as an index of the imaginary 'heritage' passed on, the racial symbolism, the alimentary sign of Chineseness" (31). This obsession with the minutiae of process and material becomes a part of what Shu-Mei Shih calls a "p*rno-culinary genre" (1), another way for 'chinese-ness' to be observed, assessed, and ultimately consumed. A site that reacts explicitly to this commodification of Asian-ness, and particularly Asian women, is Mimi Nguyen's Exoticise This! It provides an excellent listing of Asian feminist and Third World women's resources, zines, and creative work. Notably, it is one of the few critically engaged, non-p*rnographic sites that will appear during a search for "Asian women" using Web search engines or directories. As pointers of racial/cultural doubling, the food markers mentioned above assume a constant social or mental bearing as 'towards white': white as the centre, as the most desired once again. The community or familial censure that this 'doubling' encounters could be read as a start in eroding the assumed attractive power of being 'white,' except that the judgments are based on essentialist ideas of what white/non-white means (in behaviour, talk, etc.) and their incompatability. This mode of reasoning maintains that a subject must be one side of the hyphenated identity or the other. For the most part, the terms used to describe the 'whitened' Others are analogous with various versions of raw produce and organic perishables. Conversely, "whiteness [is] often signified ... by commodities and brands: Wonder Bread, Kleenex, Heinz 57. In this identification, whiteness [comes] to be seen as spoiled by capitalism, and as being linked with capitalism in a way other cultures are not" (Frankenberg 199). The condition of whiteness as embodying capitalism inflect various constructions of western 'modernity', as well as the assumption that this kind of modernity is the logical state to which all nations and communities aspire. The growing area of 'whiteness' studies, and publications like Race Traitor, challenge this notion of a neutral flesh colour. The tokenistic acceptance of racial minority communities promotes divisiveness by allowing only a narrow range of representation for 'coloured' peoples. This perpetuates the masking of white privilege in that it remains the always-present and never-questioned. David Palumbo-Liu, an Asian-American race theorist, presents the symbiotic relationship between Korean-Americans and Anglo-Americans in the 1990s as an example of this creation of self-destructive alienation. He uses the incidents surrounding the 1992 Los Angeles riots, post-Rodney King trial, to emphasise how "Korean-Americans were represented as the frontline forces of the white bourgeoisie" (371), protecting their goods and property, being part of the capitalist programme which enabled them to become asset-rich 'Americans'. In most images and reports, the presence of white Americans (in downtown south-central Los Angeles) was elided while that of black Americans was amplified. Ruth Frankenberg suggests that "racist discourse ... frequently accords hypervisibility to African Americans and a relative invisibility to Asian Americans and Native Americans" (12). Palumbo-Liu states more specifically: the locating, real and figurative, of Asians in between the dominant and minor is made less tenuous and even rationalized by a particular element which situates Asians within the dominant ideology, and frees them of the burden of their ethnicity and race while retaining (for obvious ideological purposes) the signifier of racial difference: the notion of self-affirmative action. (371) The basic desire to be accepted/assimilated into majority white societies has meant that, in some instances, Asian citizens are complicit with the promulgation of certain stereotypes of themselves. Bypassing the expectations and approvals of white society altogether are increasing numbers of Asian-Canadian and Asian-American texts, whether in the form of novels, magazines (such as Giant Robot), or films, which do not assume a white audience but, instead, one that recognises the stereotypes and amalgamations of being part of diasporic Asian communities in North America and elsewhere. References Brydon, Diana. "Discovering 'Ethnicity': Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Mena Abdullah's Time of the Peaco*ck." Australian/Canadian Literatures in English: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Russell McDougall and Gillian Whitlock. Melbourne: Methuen, 1987. 94-110. Ching, Yau. "Can I Have MSG, an Egg Roll To Suck on and Asian American Media on the Side?" Fuse 20.1 (1997): 27-34. Dyson, Michael Eric. "Essentialism and the Complexities of Racial Identity." Multiculturalism: A Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 218-29. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge, 1993. Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. Edmonton: NeWest P, 1994. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Markham: Penguin, 1981. Lee, Ang, dir. Eat Drink Man Woman. Samuel Goldwyn, 1994. Palumbo-Liu, David. "Los Angeles, Asians, and Perverse Ventriloquisms: On the Function of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary." Public Culture 6 (1994): 365-81. Shih, Shu-mei. "Globalization, Minoritization, and Ang Lee's Films." Paper given at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies, 23-28 June 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tseen Khoo. "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, p*rno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php>. Chicago style: Tseen Khoo, "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, p*rno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tseen Khoo. (1999) Fetishising flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian representation, p*rno-culinary genres, and the racially marked body. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]).

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Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. — Anne Anlin Cheng, OrnamentalismIn this (apparently) very versatile piece of clothing, she [Michelle Zauner] smokes, sings karaoke, rides motorcycles, plays a killer guitar solo … and much more. Is there anything you can’t do in a hanbok?— Li-Wei Chu, commentary, From the Intercom IntroductionAnne Anlin Cheng describes the anomaly of being “the yellow woman”, women of Asian descent in Western contexts, by underlining the haunting effects of this artificial identity on multiple politically valent forms, especially through Asian women’s conceived ambivalent relations to subject- and object-hood. Due to the entangled constructiveness conjoining Asiatic identities with objects, things, and ornaments, Cheng calls for new ways to “accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life” (14). Following this call, this essay articulates a creative combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification and Avery Gordon’s haunting theory to account for some hauntingly disidentificatory ways that the performance of diaspora sensibilities reimagines Asian American life and femininity.This essay considers “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016) (EWLY), the music video of Michelle Zauner’s solo musical project Japanese Breakfast, as a ghostly performance, which features a celebration of the Korean culture and identity of Zauner (Song). I analyse it as a site for identifying the confrontational moments and haunting effects of the diaspora sensibilities performed by Zauner who is in fact Jewish-Korean-American. Directed by Zauner and Adam Kolodny, the music video of EWLY features the persona that I call the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, singing in a restroom cubicle, eating a Dunkin Donuts sandwich, shotgunning a beer, shredding a Fender electric guitar on the hood of a truck, riding a motorcycle with her queer lover, and partying with a crowd all in the traditional Korean attire hanbok that used to belong to her late mother. The story ends with Zauner waking up on a bench with a hangover and fleeing from the scene, conjuring up a journey of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-liberation through multiple sites and scenes of everyday life.What I call a ghostly performance is concerned with Avery Gordon’s creative intervention of haunting as a method of social analysis to study the intricate lingering impact of ghostly matters from the past on the present. Jacques Derrida develops hauntology to describe how Marxism continues to haunt Western societies even after its so-called failure. It refers to a status that something is neither present nor absent. Gordon develops haunting as a way of knowing and a method of knowledge production, “forcing a confrontation, forking the future and the past” (xvii). A ghostly performance is thus where ghostly matters are mobilised in “confrontational moments”:when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (xvi)The interstitiality that transgresses and reconfigures the geographical and temporal borders of nation, culture, and Eurocentric discourses of progression is important for understanding the diverse experiences of diaspora sensibilities as critical double consciousness (Dayal 48, 53). As Gordon suggests, confrontational moments force us to confront and expose the interstitial state of objects, subjects, feelings, and conditions. Hence, to understand this study identifies the confrontational moments in Zauner’s performance as a method to identify and deconstruct the triggering moments of diaspora sensibilities.While deconstructing the ghostly performances of diaspora sensibilities, the essay also adopts an object-oriented approach to serve as a focused entry point. Not only does this approach designate a more focused scope with regard to applying Gordon’s hauntology and Muñoz’s disidentification theory, it also taps into a less attended territory of object theories such as Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented ontology due to the overlooking of the relationship between objects and racialisation that is much explored in Asian American and critical race and ethnic studies (Shomura). Moreover, while diaspora as, or not as, an object of study has been a contested topic (e.g., Axel; Cho), the objects of diaspora have been less studied.This essay elaborates on two ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails. It uncovers two haunting effects throughout the analysis: the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America. By defying the objectification of Asian bodies with objects of diaspora and refusing to assimilate into the American nightlife, Zauner’s Korean woman persona haunts a multiculturalist post-racial America that fails to recognise the specificities and historicity of Korean America and performs an alternative reality. Disidentificatory ghostly performance therefore, I suggest, thrives on confrontations between the past and the present while gesturing toward the futurities of alternative Americas. Mobilising the critical lenses of disidentification and ghostly performance, finally, I aver that disidentificatory ghostly performances have great potential for envisioning a better politics of performing and representing Asian bodies through the ghostly play of haunting objects/ghostly matters.The Embodied (Objects) and the Disembodied (Ghosts) of DisidentificationThe sonic-visual lifeworld constructed in the music video of EWLY is, first of all, a cultural public sphere, through which social norms are contested, reimagined, and reconfigured. A cultural public sphere reveals the imbricated relations between the political, the public, and the personal as contested through affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications (McGuigan 15). Considering the sonic-visual landscape as a cultural public sphere foregrounds two dimensions of Gordon’s hauntology theory: the psychological and the sociopolitical states. The emphasis on its affective communicative capacities enables the psychological reach of a cultural production. Meanwhile, the multilayered articulation of the political, the public, and the personal shows the inner-network of acts of haunting even when they happen chiefly on the sociopolitical level. What is crucial about cultural public spheres for minoritarian subjects is the creative space offered for negotiating one’s position in capacious and flexible ways that non-cultural publics may not allow. One of the ways is through imagination and disputation (McGuigan 16). The idea that imagination and disputation may cause a temporal and spatial disjunction with the present is important for Muñoz’s theorisation of disidentification. With such disjunction, Muñoz believes, queer of colour performances create future-oriented visions and coterminous temporality of the present and the future. These future-oriented visions and the coterminous temporality can be thought through disidentifications, which Muñoz identifies asa performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. Disidentification resists the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and counteridentification. (97)Disidentification offers a method to identify specific moments of imagination and disputation and moments of temporal and spatial disjunction. The most distinct example of the co-nature of imagination and disputation residing in the EWLY lifeworld is the persona of the Korean woman orchestrated by Zauner, as she intrudes into the everyday field of American life in a hanbok, such as a bar, a basketball court, and a convenience store. Gordon would call these moments “confrontational moments” (xvi). When performers don’t perform in ways they are supposed to perform, when they don’t operate objects in ways they are supposed to operate, when they don’t mobilise feelings in ways they are supposed to feel, they resist and disidentify with “the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology” (Muñoz 97).In addition to Muñoz’s disidentification and Gordon’s confrontational moments, I adopt an object-oriented approach to guide my analysis of disidentificatory ghostly performances. Object theory departs from objects and matters to rediscover identity and experience. My object-oriented approach follows new materialism more closely than object-oriented ontology because it is less about debating the ontology of Asian American experiences through the lens of objects. Instead, it is more about how re-orienting our attention towards the formation and operation of objecthood reveals and reconfigures the vexed articulation between Asian American experiences and racialised objectification. To this end, my oriented-object approach aligns particularly well with politically engaged frameworks such as Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Eunjung Kim’s ethics of objects.Taking an object-oriented approach in inquiring Asian American identities could be paradoxically intervening because “Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects” (Shomura). Furthermore, this objectification is doubly performed onto the bodies of Asian American women due to the Orientalist conflations of Asia as feminine (Huang 187). Therefore, applying object theory in the case of EWLY requires special attention to the interplay between subject- and object-hood and the line between objecthood and objectification. To avoid the risk of objectification when exploring the objecthood of ghostly matters, I caution against an objects-define-subjects chain of signification and instead suggest a subjects-operate-objects route of inquiry by attending to both the haunting effects of objects and how subjects mobilise such haunting effects in their performance. From a new materialist perspective, it is also important to disassociate problems of objectification from exploration of objecthood (Kim) while excavating the world-making abilities of objects (Bennett). For diasporic peoples, it means to see objects as affective and nostalgic vessels, such as toys, food, family photos, attire, and personal items (e.g., Oum), where traumas of displacement can be stored and rehearsed (Turan 54).What is revealing from a racialised subject-object relationship is what Christopher Bush calls “the ethnicity of things”: things can have ethnicity, an identification that hinges on the articulation that “thingliness can be constituted in ways analogous and related to structures of racialization” (85). This object-oriented approach to inquiry can expose the artificial nature of the affinity between Asian bodies and certain objects, behind which is a confession of naturalised racial order of signification. One way to disrupt this chain of signification is to excavate the haunting objects that disidentify with the norms of the present, that conjure up what the present wants to be done. This “something-to-be-done” characteristic is critical to acts of haunting (Gordon xvii). Such disruptive performances are what I term as “disidentificatory ghostly performances”, connecting the embodied objects with Gordon’s disembodied ghosts through the lens of Muñoz’s disidentificatory reading with a two-fold impact: first exposing such artificial affinity and then suggesting alternative ways of knowing.In what follows, I expand upon two haunting objects/ghostly matters: the manicured nails and the hanbok. I contend that Zauner operates these haunting objects to embody the “something-to-be-done” characteristic by curating uncomfortable, confrontational moments, where the constituted affinity between Koreanness/Asianness and anomaly is instantiated and unsettled in multiple snippets of the mundane post-racial, post-globalisation world.What Can the Korean Woman (Not) Do with Those Nails and in That Hanbok?The hanbok that Zauner wears throughout the music video might be the single most powerful haunting object in the story. This authentic hanbok belonged to Zauner’s late mother who wore it to her wedding. Dressing in the hanbok while navigating the nightlife, it becomes a mediated, trans-temporal experience for both Zauner and her mother. A ghostly journey, you could call it. The hanbok then becomes a ghostly matter that haunts both the Orientalist gaze and the grieving Zauner. This journey could be seen as a process of dealing with personal loss, a process of “reckoning with ghosts” (Gordon 190). The division between the personal and the public, the historical and the present cease to exist as linear and clear-cut forces. The important role of ghosts in the performance are the efforts of historicising and specifying the persona of the Korean woman, which is a strategy for minoritarian performers to resist “the pull of reductive multicultural pluralism” (Muñoz 147). These ghostly matters haunt a pluralist multiculturalist post-racial America that refuses to see minor specificities and historicity.The Korean woman in an authentic hanbok, coupled with other objects of Korean roots, such as a traditional hairdo and seemingly exotic makeup, may invite the Orientalist gaze or the assumption that Zauner is self-commodifying and self-fetishising Korean culture, risking what Cheng calls “Oriental female objectification” operating through “the lenses of commodity and sexual fetishism” (14). However, she “fails” to do any of these. The ways Zauner acts in the hanbok manifests a self-negotiation with her Korean identity through disidentificatory sensibilities with racial fetishism. For example, in various scenes, the Korean woman appears to be drunk in a bar, gorging a sandwich, shotgunning a beer, smoking in a restroom cubicle, messing with strangers in a basketball court, rocking on a truck, and falling asleep on a bench. Some may describe what she does as abnormal, discomforting, and even disgusting in a traditional Korean garment which is usually worn on formal occasions. The Korean woman not only subverts her traditional Koreanness but also disidentifies with what the Asian fetish requires of Asian bodies: obedient, well-behaved model minority or the hypersexualised dragon lady (e.g., Hsu; Shimizu). Zauner’s performance foregrounds the sentimental, the messy, the frenetic, the aggressive, and the carnivalesque as essential qualities and sensibilities of the Korean woman. These rarely visible figurations of Asian femininities speak to the normalised public disappearance of “unwanted” sides of Asian bodies.Wavering public disappearance is a crucial haunting effect. The public disappearance is an “organized system of repression” (Gordon 72) and a “state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). While the journey of EWLY evolves through ups and downs, the Korean woman does not maintain the ephemeral joy and takes offence at the people and surroundings now and then, such as at an arcade in the bar, at some basketball players, or at the audience or the camera operator. The performed disaffection and the conflicts substantiate a theory of “positive perversity” through which Asian American women claim the representation of their sexuality and desires (Shimizu), engendering a strong and visible presence of the ghostly matters operated by the Korean woman. This noticeable arrival of bodies disorients how things are arranged (Ahmed 163), revealing and disrupting whiteness, which functions as a habit and a background to actions (149). The confrontational performances of the encounters between Zauner and others cast a critique of the racial politics of disappearing by reifying disappearing into confrontational moments in the everyday post-racial world.What is also integral to Zauner’s antagonistic performance of wavering public disappearing and failure of “Oriental female objectification” is a punk strategy of negativity through an aesthetic of nihilism and a mediation of performing objects. For example, in addition to the traditional hairdo that goes with her makeup, Zauner also wears a nose ring; in addition to partying with a crowd, she adopts a moshing style of dancing, being carried over people’s heads in the hanbok. All these, in addition to her disaffectionate, aggressive, and impolite body language, express a negative punk aesthetics. Muñoz describes such a negative punk aesthetics as an energy that can be described “as chaotic, as creating a life without rhyme or reason, as quintessentially self-destructive” (97). What lies at the heart of this punk dystopia is the desire for “something else”, something “not the present time or place” (Muñoz). Through this desire for impossible time and place, utopian is reimagined, a race riot, in Mimi Thi Nguyen’s term.On the other hand, the manicured fingernails are also a major operating force, reminiscent of Korean American immigrant history along with the racialised labor relations that have marked Korean bodies as an alien anomaly (Liu). With “Japanese Breakfast” being written on the screen in neon pink with some dazzling effect, the music video begins in a warm tone. The story begins with Zauner selecting EWLY with her finger on a karaoke operation screen, the first of many shots on her carefully manicured nails, decorated with transparent nail extensions, sparkly ornaments, and hanging fine chains. These nails conjure up the nail salon business in the US that heavily depended on immigrant labor and Korean women immigrants have made significant economic contributions through the manicure business. In particular, differently from Los Angeles where nail salons have been predominantly Vietnamese and Chinese owned, Korean women immigrants in the 1980s were the first ones to open nail salons in New York City and led to the rapid growth of the business (Kang 51). The manicured nails first of all conjure up these recent histories associated with the nail salon business.Moreover, these fingernails haunt post-racial and post-globalisation America by revealing and subverting the invisible, normalised racial and ethnic nature of the labor and objects associated with fingernails cosmetic treatment. Ghostly matters inform “a method of knowledge production and a way of writing that could represent the damage and the haunting of the historical alternatives” (Gordon xvii). They function as a reminder of the damage that seems forgotten or normalised in modern societies and as an alternative embodiment of what modern societies could have become. In the universe of EWLY, the fingernails become a forceful ghostly matter by reminding us of the damage done onto Korean bodies by fixing them as service performers instead customers. The nail salon business as performed by immigrant labor has been a business of “buying and selling of deference and attentiveness”, where white customers come to exercise their privilege while not wanting anything associated with Koreaness or Otherness (Kang 134). However, as a haunting force, the fingernails subvert such labor relations by acting as a versatile agent operating varied objects, such as a karaoke machine, cigarettes, a sandwich, a Fender guitar, and a can of beer. Through such operating, an alternative labor relation is formed. This alternative is not entirely without roots. As promoted in Japanese Breakfast’s Instagram (@jbrekkie), Zauner’s look was styled by a nail artist who appears to be a white female, Celeste Marie Welch from the DnA Salon based in Philadelphia. This is a snippet of a field that is now a glocalised industry, where the racial and gender makeup is more diverse. It is increasingly easier to see non-Asian and non-female nail salon workers, among whom white nail salon workers outnumbered any other non-Asian racial/ethnic groups (Preeti et al. 23). EWLY’s alternative worldmaking is not only a mere reflection of the changing makeup of an industry but also calling out the societal tendency of forgetting histories. To be haunted, as Gordon explains, is to be “tied to historical and social effects” (190). The ghostly matters of the manicure industry haunt its workers, artists, consumers, and businesspeople of a past that prescribes racialised labor divisions, consumption relations, and the historical and social effects inflicted on the Othered bodies. Performing with the manicured nails, Zauner challenges now supposedly multicultural manicure culture by fusing oppositional, trans-temporal identities into the persona of the Korean woman. Not only does she conjure up the racialised labor relations as the child of a Korean mother, she also disidentifies with the worker identity of early Korean women immigrants as a consumer who receives service from an artist who would otherwise never perform such labor in the past.Conclusion: Toward a Disidentificatory Ghostly PerformanceThis essay suggests seeing the disidentificatory ghostly performance of the Korean woman as an artistic incarnation of her lived Othering experience, which Zauner may or may not navigate on an everyday basis. As Zauner lives through what looks like a typical Friday night in an American town, the journey represents an interrogation of the present and the past. When the ghostly matters move through public spaces – when she drinks in a bar, walks down the street, and parties with a crowd – the Korean woman neither conforms to what she is expected to do in a hanbok nor does she get fully assimilated into this American nightlife.Derrida avers that haunting, repression, and hegemony are structurally interlocked and that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” because “hegemony still organizes the repression” (46). This is why the creative capacity of disidentificatory performances is crucial for acts of haunting and for historically repressed groups of people. Conjoining the future-oriented performative mode of disidentification and the forking of the past and the present by ghostly performances, disidentificatory ghostly performances enable not only people of colour but also particularly diasporic populations of colour to challenge racial chains of signification and orchestrate future-oriented visions, where time is of the most compassion, at its utmost capacity.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–168.Axel, Brian Keith. “Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of Study.” History and Anthropology 9.4 (1996): 415–443.Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Bush, Christopher. “The Ethnicity of Things in America’s Lacquered Age.” Representations 99.1 (2007): 74–98. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. 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Whilst urban growth is generally accepted as a global phenomenon, this has numerous and ambivalent implications for Australia and its identity-work. Suburbia the site where the majority of Australians live, located somewhere between the privileged spaces of the city and the bush comes into focus as the emblematic topos through which the representational work of nation is articulated. Here, space becomes imbued with much current Australian political import. This article puts the discursive representation of Australian suburbia into juncture with hegemonic formations of nationness, and posits potential critical refigurations of these formations by mobilising a spatialised politics of cultural difference. Suburbia has come to represent a site of egalitarianism, signifying a truly Australian way of life. The masculinist and colonialist Australian myth of egalitarianism is constituted through a practice of carving up the land into equal portions, such that each man could have his stake in the country (Chambers 87). In this schema, the ownership of a detached house on a plot of land ensures proper and viable national subjects, since what is known as the suburban good life is nestled in a conception of house as home, where home is that which is familiar and secure. Consider John Howard's nationalist rhetoric: I believe that the concept of home is a compelling notion in our psyche…The loss of security challenges traditional notions of home and people feel the need to react to alienation…he or she must embrace what is secure, what people see as 'home.' (qtd. in Burke 8) It comes as no surprise, then, that Howard has initiated a scheme that grants $7000 to young couples toward establishing their first home. Home is not only a metaphor for nation; home is constituted in a material way through the house. The secure, housed, nation is most effectively enacted through the house and its ideal subjects: the white model of the heterosexual nuclear family. If European nostalgia is under threat, Howard's response is to maintain attempts to recover a unified national home. Ghassan Hage writes that the homely nation is itself an aspiration that guides the national subject's practices (68-9, my emphasis). Howard's anxiety is displayed in his response to the recent Tampa crisis, and it has become overwhelmingly evident who or what is not figured in his homely imaginary. Textuality becomes an effective means by which to negotiate and contest these dominant discourses of nation-space, and their prescribed modes of subjectivity. Suneeta Peres da Costa's recent novel Homework provides one such exigent re-mapping of nation-informed discourses of suburbia. Peres da Costa's text enacts a strategic invocation of cultural difference. Here, difference is not meant to connote inclusion or assimilation; difference must be seen as a dynamic constitutive mode of oppositionality, a provisional but insurrectionary and necessarily strategic other to dominant formations of nationness. As the novel's title itself suggests, home is work the work of being between spaces. Working from within the interstices of locatedness and worldliness allows the text to challenge embedded hegemonic inscriptions of nation-space. Whilst the novel was written and set in Australia, its packaging and subsequent reception also evokes the current trend of diasporic cosmopolitanism, signaling a world supposedly exempt from national belonging (Brennan qtd. in Kaplan 123). The novel was published simultaneously in the UK, the US, and Australia by Bloomsbury in 1999. The construction of this worldliness is here constituted in the politics of publishing, but this (dis)juncture between national and international, or the local and global, continues in the narrative itself. The narrative traverses both Australian domestic spaces and (imagined) international spaces. The fictive autobiography details Mina Pereira's late-childhood years as she lives with her family in suburban Rain Hill, Sydney. Whilst Mina and her sisters have grown up in Australia, their parents originate from Portuguese Goa, and Bombay, India. The narrative produces a tension between a global dislocation, where both Mr and Mrs Pereira's different and contradictory forms of homesickness are articulated, and the situatedness of Australia, where colonialism continues to construct hegemonic narratives of nationness. It is at this (dis)juncture that the narrative re-writes suburban space. Integrated into the suburban landscape and, in particular, the house itself, is the psychic space of memory. In the Pereira's house involuntary memories of former spaces and incidents in both Australia and India are evoked. A prolonged melancholia infiltrates the psychic and actual suburban spaces of the text, and in particular, the Federation house that the family lives in. If the Federation house signifies national unification, then this text enacts a kind of dis-unification of nation. With, in Gaston Bachelard's words, the past com[ing] to dwell in the new house (5), the seamless coherence of the suburban house is ruptured. As Homi Bhabha writes, [t]he recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. (9) In Homework, memory stretches beyond the limits of the nation such that nostalgia, as a politicised construction of the present, productively challenges the nation's boundaries. As Ien Ang writes, diasporas have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of 'national culture' or 'national identity' with origins firmly rooted in fixed geography and common history (7). In this sense, the text interrogates the representational work of nation that attempts to maintain integrity and unity through incessant policing and securing of its borders. In Homework, the suburban house becomes unhomely, or unheimlich, in the haunting of subjects' memories that inhabit it, such that the house becomes not a tool for inculcating Australian nationness, but a zone of intermediacy between home and world. From this border space, that Homi Bhabha calls international (38) for the space of translation, negotiation, and hybridity, Australian space is unbounded and defamiliarised. Homework effectively dislodges the nation's homely imaginary by pointing to the excesses of belonging. Here home, as a mode of security and belonging, becomes detached from house. Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat write that belonging cannot be housed simply within the material space of walls and roofs, of fenced topographies and well-drawn maps (1). This re-writing of hegemonic spatiality is concomitant with the re-constitution of prescribed modes of subjectivity. A politics of difference becomes a tool of creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance (Trinh 73). Cultural difference must be seen as disordering, as opening up new spaces for critical exchange (Soja and Hooper 193), and as positing new ways of critically writing and occupying spaces. By spatialising this politics of difference, the supposedly coherent spatiality of suburbia is ruptured and shown to be vulnerable. Re-narrating suburban spaces according to a politics of difference has the potential to dislodge hegemonic narratives that have become naturalised as they are mapped onto, or materialised in, real spaces. At the conclusion of Homework, the Pereira's house is enflamed. In this spectacular climax, part oneiric and fantastical, the house on fire becomes, in its pyrotechnical wizardry (255), a final recalcitrant figure to Australian suburban space. Merging with, and working against, that other sanctioned element of official multiculturalism, food, the fire sends out a toxic vapour to the hegemonic suburb: The pungent perfume that hung in a thick vapour above us was that of a vast spice warehouse burning to the ground. I could smell vast vats of mango and lime pickle; the bittersweet of cardamom spores that, with the intensity of the heat must have burst from their pods; peppercorns and paprika; turmeric, tamarind, and bay leaf; all these now lingered and mingled in a masala of mixed messages with the certain scents of dried cloves and the singular aroma of coriander. (256-7) The Federation house, with its symbolic encodings of nationness, is not only under de(con)struction here, but this image of a monstrous other further insults the suburban landscape's very senses. At the very heart of Australian suburbia is a stirring of the unhomely that is bound to repeat its disturbance to the mappings of nation. References Ang, Ien. Migrations of Chineseness. SPAN 34 (1993) : 9 pp. <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom...> Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Burke, Anthony. Australia's Asian Crisis. Australian Humanities Review June (2001) : 9 pp. 27 August 2001 <http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/I...> Chambers, Deborah. A Stake in the Country: Women's Experiences of Suburban Development. Visions of Suburbia. Ed. Roger Silverstone. London: Routledge, 1997. 86-107. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Leichhardt: Pluto Press, 1998. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Peres da Costa, Suneeta. Homework. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Soja, Edward, and Barbara Hooper. The Spaces that Difference Makes: Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics. Place and the Politics of Identity. Ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 183-205. Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference. Inscriptions 3-4 (1988) : 71-7. Links http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/34/Ang.html http://www.lib.latrobe.edu/AHR/archive/Issue-June-2001/burke.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bullock, Emily. "Re-Writing Suburbia" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php>. Chicago Style Bullock, Emily, "Re-Writing Suburbia" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Bullock, Emily. (2002) Re-Writing Suburbia. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/suburbia.php> ([your date of access]).

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Aglukark, Susan. Una Huna?: What Is This? Illustrated by Amanda Sandland and Danny Christopher, Inhabit Media, 2018. Juno-award-winning Inuk singer-songwriter Susan Aglukark has had tremendous success blending languages (Inuktitut and English) to tell the stories of her people through popular music. She has now published the first in a planned series of six picture books intended for both Inuit and non-Inuit readers, a series that celebrates the resilience of the Inuit people. The series focuses on a period of tremendous change, beginning late in the nineteenth century, when more and more European traders began to regularly visit Inuit camps. This changing world is seen through the eyes of a young Inuk girl named Ukpik. Ukpik is a happy little girl who is excitedly seeking the perfect name for her new puppy. A precocious child, she is eager to try new things, to ask questions, and to share newfound knowledge with the other children in camp. She is eager to understand and embrace the European tools for which her family trades—in this story, it is cutlery (knives, forks, and spoons)—but she wonders if these objects will forever change their happy way of life. Ukpik’s grandmother offers reassurance and helps the little girl to thoughtfully consider her family’s place in a rapidly changing world. As she has done so successfully with her music, Aglukark has peppered Una Huna? with Inuktitut words that will introduce young readers to Inuit culture without confusing them or significantly slowing the pace of the story. The charming illustrations by Amanda Sandland and Danny Christopher are very suitable for children and lend a fairly realistic sense of place. Appropriately, this book was published by the first independent publishing company in Nunavut; Inuit-owned Inhabit Media seeks to promote and preserve Inuit mythology and traditional knowledge. Una Huna? is highly recommended for readers aged 5 to 7. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Linda Quirk Linda taught courses in Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a librarian at University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections.

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Smucker, Barbara. Underground to Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 2013. Print.A reprint of a historical novel first published in 1977, Underground to Canada is the gripping story of two young girls who rely on the secret network of courageous and sympathetic people which helped thousands of fugitive slaves on their dangerous journey from the American south to Canada and freedom. This covert network came to be known as the “Underground Railroad.” In his introduction, award-winning author Lawrence Hill notes that after being in print for decades, “Underground to Canada still serves as a wonderful introduction to a vital and fascinating element of Canadian history.” In an excerpt from his 1967 Massey Lectures reprinted here, Martin Luther King Jr. says, “Deep in our history of struggle for freedom Canada was the North Star. The Negro slave, denied education, de-humanized, imprisoned on cruel plantations, knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave, if he survived the horrors of the journey, could find freedom.”The subject matter of this novel is challenging, but, in a world which has yet to put an end to childhood slavery, its message is an important one. As Lawrence Hill notes, referring to the institution of slavery and the horrors of the Holocaust, “writers, teachers and parents do no one a favour by pretending that such things didn’t exist.” Written with young readers in mind, this novel avoids delving into the worst elements of the institution of slavery. It is, however, subtle enough to acknowledge the many difficulties faced by former slaves as they began new lives in Canada. In addition to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. and the introduction by Lawrence Hill, this edition includes thought-provoking questions and activities in the back of the book which may help children to think about the novel’s difficult topics, either individually or with classmates. This is a powerful, essential, novel for the education of young readers—it is recommended for readers over nine years of age—but this particular edition is shoddily produced. I could not help but notice obvious significant errors on pages 27, 84, 133, and 151, and I suspect that I could find many more if I tried. While I cannot give such a substandard edition four stars, I whole-heartedly recommend this title and urge readers to choose a different edition.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become the Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have been forgotten by history.

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Levine, Karen. Hana’s Suitcase Anniversary Album. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2012. Print. The true story of Hana’s Suitcase began when a teacher named Fumiko Ishioka was inspired to try to answer some of the questions asked by visiting Japanese school children about a suitcase on display in the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center. The suitcase had come from the Auschwitz death camp. Marked with a girl’s name, her date of birth (May 16, 1931), and the German word for orphan (“Waisenkind”), the empty suitcase offered few clues, but Fumiko was determined to learn what she could about the owner of the suitcase Hana Brady. First published in 2002, Hana’s Suitcase told the interrelated stories of a group of curious Japanese children, the remarkable journey of discovery undertaken by their very determined teacher, and the story of an inquisitive and energetic young Czech girl who was among “the one-and-a-half million children who died in the Holocaust”. Author Karen Levine accomplished a great deal with this book. Not only did she teach readers about how history is discovered, she showed us that those who have been forgotten by history can, in fact, be found again. Furthermore, she found a way to talk about one of the darkest chapters in human history in a way that is suitable for young readers, producing a remarkable book which is, at the same time, both terribly heartbreaking and profoundly hopeful. We are told that in its first ten years the book was “published in forty-five countries and has been the catalyst for stage and film dramatizations, prose, poetry, and every kind of exploration of the worst and best humanity has to offer. It has won national and international recognition, and holds the most awards of any Canadian children’s book ever”. This new edition, Hana’s Suitcase Anniversary Album, includes all of the original content – including the forward by Desmond Tutu – but it offers 64 pages of additional material, including memories from one-time neighbours of the Brady family, and responses to Hana’s story from children, parents, and teachers. The new material, while very interesting, need not inspire anyone to purchase a second copy of the book. Nevertheless, the new edition may help to bring this extraordinary book to a new generation of young readers. This book, in its new or original form, is strongly recommended for readers who are at least 10 years of age. Highly Recommended: 4 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become the Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have been forgotten by history.

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Michaels, Anne. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour, illustrated by Emma Block. Tundra Books, 2015. The winner of numerous awards, Anne Michaels has earned her place among Canada’s most talented wordsmiths. Long a respected Canadian poet, her brilliant debut novel—Fugitive Pieces (1996)—brought her international acclaim. The Adventures of Miss Petitfour is Michaels’ first book for children. Emma Block is a young freelance illustrator who has already established a reputation for delicately feminine and delightfully quirky illustrations. Her work can be seen in children’s books, Hallmark products, and in tableware. This book represents a nearly perfect partnership between the author and the illustrator.Among other things, this is a book about the stories we like to tell and read. The books in the village bookshop near Miss Petitfour’s house are divided into two sections: ho-hum and hum. The former are books in which nothing ever happens, but are “full of interesting facts that would never come in useful” and the latter are adventure books.This charming little book is certainly not ho-hum, but neither does it offer grand adventures. The adventures of the unconventional Miss Petitfour and her sixteen fun-loving cats—all of whom go everywhere with her, quite literally wherever the wind takes them—are adventures of "just the right size—fitting into a single, magical day." These little adventures demonstrate that sometimes “the best things happen” when “things work out differently than you expect.”Young bookworms and aspiring writers will be delighted to find that Michaels offers them a peak behind the curtain, one that reveals some of the key elements in the construction of a story, and explains how these elements function with clarity and wit. For example, in the midst of a major digression in a story about a trip to buy marmalade, we are told that a digression is “when the story wanders off the point and gets lost” and that it can be the best part of a story. Several digressions follow naturally and are clearly marked as such. In another story, we are told that a coincidence “is something that happens at just the right moment,” and that stories use them “to fix up tricky tangles”, following which, coincidentally, the story—about a confetti factory explosion—cleverly and humorously demonstrates the technique several times in rapid succession.The name of the main character—Miss Petitfour—is somewhat unexpected, but the delicate and ornate nature of the French pastry known as a petitfour makes it a suitable metaphor at the heart of a little book that celebrates little everyday adventures, decorative language, and fanciful illustrations in a way that is light and sweet and fun. This book is very highly recommended for children of all ages and is well suited for reading aloud.Highly recommended: four stars out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a teaching librarian at University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have long been forgotten by history.

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Hill, Janet. Miss Moon, Wise Words from a Dog Governess. Illus. Janet Hill. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2016. Print.This book is disappointing because it lacks the wise (or whimsical) words that it promises and offers only well-worn clichés, like “practice makes perfect” and “remember your manners.” These trite teachings are not offered as part of a story, but simply as a series of lessons. We are told in the introduction that Miss Wilhelmina Moon learned these lessons when she worked for a time as the “governess to sixty-seven dogs on an island off the coast of France,” but we never learn what led her to these insights. The introduction teases us by suggesting that we are about to read about the adventures of a dog governess with an absurdly large number of charges. Unfortunately, there is no story here so the introduction’s implausible premise just seems odd and the text is nothing more than a list of hackneyed expressions. At the back of the book is a “class photo” of the sixty-seven dogs which is confusing because it seems to suggest that Miss Moon is not a governess in a private household, but a teacher at a school for dogs.Since no story grows out of the clever and original idea of an overburdened dog governess, we are left to focus on the illustrations. Dogs are cute. Children are cute. Illustrations of dogs in various guises—wearing glasses, hats, scarves, capes, or bow ties–and involved in various children’s activities—riding a bicycle, listening to a bedtime story, practicing archery, or taking a bath—can hardly fail to be appealing. Janet Hill’s sometimes adorable illustrations manage to capture something of the character of a range of dog breeds and they are sometimes very cleverly conceived, but they vary significantly in quality and sometimes seem unfocused or unfinished. Even so, the only reason to reach for this book is for the charming illustrations.Recommended with reservations: two stars out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a librarian at Bruce Peel Special Collections & Archives at the University of Alberta. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have long been forgotten by history.

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Introduction Many destinations promote culinary encounters. Foods and beverages, and especially how these will taste in situ, are being marketed as niche travel motivators and used in destination brand building across the globe. While initial usage of the term culinary tourism focused on experiencing exotic cultures of foreign destinations by sampling unfamiliar food and drinks, the term has expanded to embrace a range of leisure travel experiences where the aim is to locate and taste local specialities as part of a pleasurable, and hopefully notable, culinary encounter (Wolf). Long’s foundational work was central in developing the idea of culinary tourism as an active endeavor, suggesting that via consumption, individuals construct unique experiences. Ignatov and Smith’s literature review-inspired definition confirms the nature of activity as participatory, and adds consuming food production skills—from observing agriculture and local processors to visiting food markets and attending cooking schools—to culinary purchases. Despite importing almost all of its foodstuffs and beverages, including some of its water, Singapore is an acknowledged global leader in culinary tourism. Horng and Tsai note that culinary tourism conceptually implies that a transferal of “local or special knowledge and information that represent local culture and identities” (41) occurs via these experiences. This article adds the act of reading to these participatory activities and suggests that, because food writing forms an important component of Singapore’s suite of culinary tourism offerings, taste contributes to the cultural experience offered to both visitors and locals. While Singapore foodways have attracted significant scholarship (see, for instance, work by Bishop; Duruz; Huat & Rajah; Tarulevicz, Eating), Singapore food writing, like many artefacts of popular culture, has attracted less notice. Yet, this writing is an increasingly visible component of cultural production of, and about, Singapore, and performs a range of functions for locals, tourists and visitors before they arrive. Although many languages are spoken in Singapore, English is the national language (Alsagoff) and this study focuses on food writing in English. Background Tourism comprises a major part of Singapore’s economy, with recent figures detailing that food and beverage sales contribute over 10 per cent of this revenue, with spend on culinary tours and cookery classes, home wares such as tea-sets and cookbooks, food magazines and food memoirs additional to this (Singapore Government). This may be related to the fact that Singapore not only promotes food as a tourist attraction, but also actively promotes itself as an exceptional culinary destination. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) includes food in its general information brochures and websites, and its print, television and cinema commercials (Huat and Rajah). It also mounts information-rich campaigns both abroad and inside Singapore. The 2007 ‘Singapore Seasons’ campaign, for instance, promoted Singaporean cuisine alongside films, design, books and other cultural products in London, New York and Beijing. Touring cities identified as key tourist markets in 2011, the ‘Singapore Takeout’ pop-up restaurant brought the taste of Singaporean foods into closer focus. Singaporean chefs worked with high profile locals in its kitchen in a custom-fabricated shipping container to create and demonstrate Singaporean dishes, attracting public and media interest. In country, the STB similarly actively promotes the tastes of Singaporean foods, hosting the annual World Gourmet Summit (Chaney and Ryan) and Pacific Food Expo, both attracting international culinary professionals to work alongside local leaders. The Singapore Food Festival each July is marketed to both locals and visitors. In these ways, the STB, as well as providing events for visitors, is actively urging Singaporeans to proud of their food culture and heritage, so that each Singaporean becomes a proactive ambassador of their cuisine. Singapore Food Writing Popular print guidebooks and online guides to Singapore pay significantly more attention to Singaporean food than they do for many other destinations. Sections on food in such publications discuss at relative length the taste of Singaporean food (always delicious) as well as how varied, authentic, hygienic and suited-to-all-budgets it is. These texts also recommend hawker stalls and food courts alongside cafés and restaurants (Henderson et al.), and a range of other culinary experiences such as city and farm food tours and cookery classes. This writing describes not only what can be seen or learned during these experiences, but also what foods can be sampled, and how these might taste. This focus on taste is reflected in the printed materials that greet the in-bound tourist at the airport. On a visit in October 2013, arrival banners featuring mouth-watering images of local specialities such as chicken rice and chilli crab marked the route from arrival to immigration and baggage collection. Even advertising for a bank was illustrated with photographs of luscious-looking fruits. The free maps and guidebooks available featured food-focused tours and restaurant locations, and there were also substantial free booklets dedicated solely to discussing local delicacies and their flavours, plus recommended locations to sample them. A website and free mobile app were available that contain practical information about dishes, ingredients, cookery methods, and places to eat, as well as historical and cultural information. These resources are also freely distributed to many hotels and popular tourist destinations. Alongside organising food walks, bus tours and cookery classes, the STB also recommends the work of a number of Singaporean food writers—principally prominent Singapore food bloggers, reviewers and a number of memoirists—as authentic guides to what are described as unique Singaporean flavours. The strategies at the heart of this promotion are linking advertising to useful information. At a number of food centres, for instance, STB information panels provide details about both specific dishes and Singapore’s food culture more generally (Henderson et al.). This focus is apparent at many tourist destinations, many of which are also popular local attractions. In historic Fort Canning Park, for instance, there is a recreation of Raffles’ experimental garden, established in 1822, where he grew the nutmeg, clove and other plants that were intended to form the foundation for spice plantations but were largely unsuccessful (Reisz). Today, information panels not only indicate the food plants’ names and how to grow them, but also their culinary and medicinal uses, recipes featuring them and the related food memories of famous Singaporeans. The Singapore Botanic Gardens similarly houses the Ginger Garden displaying several hundred species of ginger and information, and an Eco(-nomic/logical) Garden featuring many food plants and their stories. In Chinatown, panels mounted outside prominent heritage brands (often still quite small shops) add content to the shopping experience. A number of museums profile Singapore’s food culture in more depth. The National Museum of Singapore has a permanent Living History gallery that focuses on Singapore’s street food from the 1950s to 1970s. This display includes food-related artefacts, interactive aromatic displays of spices, films of dishes being made and eaten, and oral histories about food vendors, all supported by text panels and booklets. Here food is used to convey messages about the value of Singapore’s ethnic diversity and cross-cultural exchanges. Versions of some of these dishes can then be sampled in the museum café (Time Out Singapore). The Peranakan Museum—which profiles the unique hybrid culture of the descendants of the Chinese and South Indian traders who married local Malay women—shares this focus, with reconstructed kitchens and dining rooms, exhibits of cooking and eating utensils and displays on food’s ceremonial role in weddings and funerals all supported with significant textual information. The Chinatown Heritage Centre not only recreates food preparation areas as a vivid indicator of poor Chinese immigrants’ living conditions, but also houses The National Restaurant of Singapore, which translates this research directly into meals that recreate the heritage kopi tiam (traditional coffee shop) cuisine of Singapore in the 1930s, purposefully bringing taste into the service of education, as its descriptive menu states, “educationally delighting the palate” (Chinatown Heritage Centre). These museums recognise that shopping is a core tourist activity in Singapore (Chang; Yeung et al.). Their gift- and bookshops cater to the culinary tourist by featuring quality culinary products for sale (including, for instance, teapots and cups, teas, spices and traditional sweets, and other foods) many of which are accompanied by informative tags or brochures. At the centre of these curated, purchasable collections are a range written materials: culinary magazines, cookbooks, food histories and memoirs, as well as postcards and stationery printed with recipes. Food Magazines Locally produced food magazines cater to a range of readerships and serve to extend the culinary experience both in, and outside, Singapore. These include high-end gourmet, luxury lifestyle publications like venerable monthly Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living, which, in in print for almost thirty years, targets an affluent readership (Wine & Dine). The magazine runs features on local dining, gourmet products and trends, as well as international epicurean locations and products. Beautifully illustrated recipes also feature, as the magazine declares, “we’ve recognised that sharing more recipes should be in the DNA of Wine & Dine’s editorial” (Wine & Dine). Appetite magazine, launched in 2006, targets the “new and emerging generation of gourmets—foodies with a discerning and cosmopolitan outlook, broad horizons and a insatiable appetite” (Edipresse Asia) and is reminiscent in much of its styling of New Zealand’s award-winning Cuisine magazine. Its focus is to present a fresh approach to both cooking at home and dining out, as readers are invited to “Whip up the perfect soufflé or feast with us at the finest restaurants in Singapore and around the region” (Edipresse Asia). Chefs from leading local restaurants are interviewed, and the voices of “fellow foodies and industry watchers” offer an “insider track” on food-related news: “what’s good and what’s new” (Edipresse Asia). In between these publications sits Epicure: Life’s Refinements, which features local dishes, chefs, and restaurants as well as an overseas travel section and a food memories column by a featured author. Locally available ingredients are also highlighted, such as abalone (Cheng) and an interesting range of mushrooms (Epicure). While there is a focus on an epicurean experience, this is presented slightly more casually than in Wine & Dine. Food & Travel focuses more on home cookery, but each issue also includes reviews of Singapore restaurants. The bimonthly bilingual (Chinese and English) Gourmet Living features recipes alongside a notable focus on food culture—with food history columns, restaurant reviews and profiles of celebrated chefs. An extensive range of imported international food magazines are also available, with those from nearby Malaysia and Indonesia regularly including articles on Singapore. Cookbooks These magazines all include reviews of cookery books including Singaporean examples – and some feature other food writing such as food histories, memoirs and blogs. These reviews draw attention to how many Singaporean cookbooks include a focus on food history alongside recipes. Cookery teacher Yee Soo Leong’s 1976 Singaporean Cooking was an early example of cookbook as heritage preservation. This 1976 book takes an unusual view of ‘Singaporean’ flavours. Beginning with sweet foods—Nonya/Singaporean and western cakes, biscuits, pies, pastries, bread, desserts and icings—it also focuses on both Singaporean and Western dishes. This text is also unusual as there are only 6 lines of direct authorial address in the author’s acknowledgements section. Expatriate food writer Wendy Hutton’s Singapore Food, first published in 1979, reprinted many times after and revised in 2007, has long been recognised as one of the most authoritative titles on Singapore’s food heritage. Providing an socio-historical map of Singapore’s culinary traditions, some one third of the first edition was devoted to information about Singaporean multi-cultural food history, including detailed profiles of a number of home cooks alongside its recipes. Published in 1980, Kenneth Mitchell’s A Taste of Singapore is clearly aimed at a foreign readership, noting the variety of foods available due to the racial origins of its inhabitants. The more modest, but equally educational in intent, Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore (in its fourth printing in 1998) contains a detailed introductory essay outlining local food culture, favourite foods and drinks and times these might be served, festivals and festive foods, Indian, Indian Muslim, Chinese, Nyonya (Chinese-Malay), Malay and Halal foods and customs, followed with a selection of recipes from each. More contemporary examples of such information-rich cookbooks, such as those published in the frequently reprinted Periplus Mini Cookbook series, are sold at tourist attractions. Each of these modestly priced, 64-page, mouthwateringly illustrated booklets offer framing information, such as about a specific food culture as in the Nonya kitchen in Nonya Favourites (Boi), and explanatory glossaries of ingredients, as in Homestyle Malay Cooking (Jelani). Most recipes include a boxed paragraph detailing cookery or ingredient information that adds cultural nuance, as well as trying to describe tastes that the (obviously foreign) intended reader may not have encountered. Malaysian-born Violet Oon, who has been called the Julia Child of Singapore (Bergman), writes for both local and visiting readers. The FOOD Paper, published monthly for a decade from January 1987 was, she has stated, then “Singapore’s only monthly publication dedicated to the CSF—Certified Singapore Foodie” (Oon, Violet Oon Cooks 7). Under its auspices, Oon promoted her version of Singaporean cuisine to both locals and visitors, as well as running cookery classes and culinary events, hosting her own television cooking series on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and touring internationally for the STB as a ‘Singapore Food Ambassador’ (Ahmad; Kraal). Taking this representation of flavor further, Oon has also produced a branded range of curry powders, spices, and biscuits, and set up a number of food outlets. Her first cookbook, World Peranakan Cookbook, was published in 1978. Her Singapore: 101 Meals of 1986 was commissioned by the STB, then known as the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. Violet Oon Cooks, a compilation of recipes from The FOOD Paper, published in 1992, attracted a range of major international as well as Singaporean food sponsors, and her Timeless Recipes, published in 1997, similarly aimed to show how manufactured products could be incorporated into classic Singaporean dishes cooked at home. In 1998, Oon produced A Singapore Family Cookbook featuring 100 dishes. Many were from Nonya cuisine and her following books continued to focus on preserving heritage Singaporean recipes, as do a number of other nationally-cuisine focused collections such as Joyceline Tully and Christopher Tan’s Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks, published in 2004, provides “a tentative account of Singapore’s food history” (5). It does this by mapping the various taste profiles of six thematically-arranged chronologically-overlapping sections, from the heritage of British colonialism, to the uptake of American and Russia foods in the Snackbar era of the 1960s and the use of convenience flavoring ingredients such as curry pastes, sauces, dried and frozen supermarket products from the 1970s. Other Volumes Other food-themed volumes focus on specific historical periods. Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire discusses the “unique hybrid” (1) cuisine of British expatriates in Singapore from 1858 to 1963. In 2009, the National Museum of Singapore produced the moving Wong Hong Suen’s Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942–1950. This details the resilience and adaptability of both diners and cooks during the Japanese Occupation and in post-war Singapore, when shortages stimulated creativity. There is a centenary history of the Cold Storage company which shipped frozen foods all over south east Asia (Boon) and location-based studies such as Annette Tan’s Savour Chinatown: Stories Memories & Recipes. Tan interviewed hawkers, chefs and restaurant owners, working from this information to write both the book’s recipes and reflect on Chinatown’s culinary history. Food culture also features in (although it is not the main focus) more general book-length studies such as educational texts such as Chew Yen f*ck’s The Magic of Singapore and Melanie Guile’s Culture in Singapore (2000). Works that navigate both spaces (of Singaporean culture more generally and its foodways) such Lily Kong’s Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, provide an consistent narrative of food in Singapore, stressing its multicultural flavours that can be enjoyed from eateries ranging from hawker stalls to high-end restaurants that, interestingly, that agrees with that promulgated in the food writing discussed above. Food Memoirs and Blogs Many of these narratives include personal material, drawing on the author’s own food experiences and taste memories. This approach is fully developed in the food memoir, a growing sub-genre of Singapore food writing. While memoirs by expatriate Singaporeans such as Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, produced by major publisher Hyperion in New York, has attracted considerable international attention, it presents a story of Singapore cuisine that agrees with such locally produced texts as television chef and food writer Terry Tan’s Stir-fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane and the food memoir of the Singaporean chef credited with introducing fine Malay dining to Singapore, Aziza Ali’s Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine, published in Singapore in 2013 with the support of the National Heritage Board. All these memoirs are currently available in Singapore in both bookshops and a number of museums and other attractions. While underscoring the historical and cultural value of these foods, all describe the unique flavours of Singaporean cuisine and its deliciousness. A number of prominent Singapore food bloggers are featured in general guidebooks and promoted by the STB as useful resources to dining out in Singapore. One of the most prominent of these is Leslie Tay, a medical doctor and “passionate foodie” (Knipp) whose awardwinning ieatŸishootŸipost is currently attracting some 90,000 unique visitors every month and has had over 20,000 million hits since its launch in 2006. An online diary of Tay’s visits to hundreds of Singaporean hawker stalls, it includes descriptions and photographs of meals consumed, creating accumulative oral culinary histories of these dishes and those who prepared them. These narratives have been reorganised and reshaped in Tay’s first book The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries, where each chapter tells the story of one particular dish, including recommended hawker stalls where it can be enjoyed. Ladyironchef.com is a popular food and travel site that began as a blog in 2007. An edited collection of reviews of eateries and travel information, many by the editor himself, the site features lists of, for example, the best cafes (LadyIronChef “Best Cafes”), eateries at the airport (LadyIronChef “Guide to Dining”), and hawker stalls (Lim). While attesting to the cultural value of these foods, many articles also discuss flavour, as in Lim’s musings on: ‘how good can chicken on rice taste? … The glistening grains of rice perfumed by fresh chicken stock and a whiff of ginger is so good you can even eat it on its own’. Conclusion Recent Singapore food publishing reflects this focus on taste. Tay’s publisher, Epigram, growing Singaporean food list includes the recently released Heritage Cookbooks Series. This highlights specialist Singaporean recipes and cookery techniques, with the stated aim of preserving tastes and foodways that continue to influence Singaporean food culture today. Volumes published to date on Peranakan, South Indian, Cantonese, Eurasian, and Teochew (from the Chaoshan region in the east of China’s Guangdong province) cuisines offer both cultural and practical guides to the quintessential dishes and flavours of each cuisine, featuring simple family dishes alongside more elaborate special occasion meals. In common with the food writing discussed above, the books in this series, although dealing with very different styles of cookery, contribute to an overall impression of the taste of Singapore food that is highly consistent and extremely persuasive. This food writing narrates that Singapore has a delicious as well as distinctive and interesting food culture that plays a significant role in Singaporean life both currently and historically. It also posits that this food culture is, at the same time, easily accessible and also worthy of detailed consideration and discussion. In this way, this food writing makes a contribution to both local and visitors’ appreciation of Singaporean food culture. References Ahmad, Nureza. “Violet Oon.” Singapore Infopedia: An Electronic Encyclopedia on Singapore’s History, Culture, People and Events (2004). 22 Nov. 2013 ‹http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_459_2005-01-14.html?s=Violet%20Oon›.Ali, Aziza. Sambal Days, Kampong Cuisine. Singapore: Ate Ideas, 2013. Alsagoff, Lubna. “English in Singapore: Culture, capital and identity in linguistic variation”. World Englishes 29.3 (2010): 336–48.Bergman, Justin. “Restaurant Report: Violet Oon’s Kitchen in Singapore.” New York Times (13 March 2013). 21 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/travel/violet-oons-kitchen-singapore-restaurant-report.html?_r=0›. Bishop, Peter. “Eating in the Contact Zone: Singapore Foodscape and Cosmopolitan Timespace.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25.5 (2011): 637–652. Boi, Lee Geok. Nonya Favourites. Singapore: Periplus Editions, 2001. Boon, Goh Chor. Serving Singapore: A Hundred Years of Cold Storage 1903-2003. Singapore: Cold Storage Pty. Ltd., 2003. Chaney, Stephen, and Chris Ryan. “Analyzing the Evolution of Singapore’s World Gourmet Summit: An Example of Gastronomic Tourism.” International Journal of Hospitality Management 31.2 (2012): 309–18. Chang, T. C. “Local Uniqueness in the Global Village: Heritage Tourism in Singapore.” The Professional Geographer 51.1 (1999): 91–103. Cheng, Tiong Li. “Royal Repast.” Epicure: Life’s Refinements January (2012): 94–6. Chinatown Heritage Centre. National Restaurant of Singapore. (12 Nov. 2012). 21 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.yoursingapore.com›.Duruz, Jean. “Living in Singapore, Travelling to Hong Kong, Remembering Australia …: Intersections of Food and Place.” Journal of Australian Studies 87 (2006): 101–15. -----. “From Malacca to Adelaide: Fragments Towards a Biography of Cooking, Yearning and Laksa.” Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, Tradition and Cooking. Eds. Sidney C.H. Cheung, and Tan Chee-Beng. London: Routledge, 2007: 183–200. -----. “Tastes of Hybrid Belonging: Following the Laksa Trail in Katong, Singapore.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25.5 (2011): 605–18. Edipresse Asia Appetite (2013). 22 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.edipresseasia.com/magazines.php?MagID=SGAPPETITE›. Epicure. “Mushroom Goodness.” Epicure: Life’s Refinements January (2012): 72–4. Epicure: Life’s Refinements. (2013) 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.epicureasia.com›. Food & Travel. Singapore: Regent Media. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.regentmedia.sg/publications_food&travel.shtml›. f*ck, Chew Yen. The Magic of Singapore. London: New Holland, 2000. Guile, Melanie. Culture in Singapore. Port Melbourne: Heinemann/Harcourt Education Australia, 2003. Hawkers Flavour: A Guide to Hawkers Gourmet in Malaysia and Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: S. Abdul Majeed & Co., 1998. Henderson, Joan C., Ong Si Yun, Priscilla Poon, and Xu Biwei. “Hawker Centres as Tourist Attractions: The Case of Singapore.” International Journal of Hospitality Management 31.3 (2012): 849–55. Horng, Jeou-Shyan, and Chen-Tsang (Simon) Tsai. “Culinary Tourism Strategic Development: An Asia‐Pacific Perspective.” International Journal of Tourism Research 14 (2011): 40–55. Huat, Chua Beng, and Ananda Rajah. “Hybridity, Ethnicity and Food in Singapore.” Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia. Eds. David Y. H. Wu, and Chee Beng Tan. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2001: 161–98. Hutton, Wendy. Singapore Food. Singapore: Martin Cavendish, 1989/2007. Ignatov, Elena, and Stephen Smith. “Segmenting Canadian Culinary Tourists.” Current Issues in Tourism 9.3 (2006): 235–55. Jelani, Rohani. Homestyle Malay Cooking. Singapore: Periplus Editions, 2003. Knipp, Peter A. “Foreword: An Amazing Labour of Love.” The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries. Leslie Tay. Singapore: Epigram Books, 2010. viii–ix. Kong, Lily. Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food. Singapore: National Environment Agency, 2007 Kraal, David. “One and Only Violet Oon.” The Straits Times 20 January (1999). 1 Nov 2012 ‹http://www.straitstimes.com› LadyIronChef. “Best Cafes in Singapore.” ladyironchef.com (31 Mar. 2011). 21 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.ladyironchef.com/2011/03/best-cafes-singapore› -----. “Guide to Dining at Changi Airport: 20 Places to Eat.” ladyironchef.com (10 Mar. 2014) 10 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.ladyironchef.com/author/ladyironchef› Leong-Salobir, Cecilia. Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire. Abingdon UK: Routledge, 2011. Lim, Sarah. “10 of the Best Singapore Hawker Food.” (14 Oct. 2013). 21 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.ladyironchef.com/2013/10/best-singapore-hawker-food›. Long, Lucy M. “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective of Eating and Otherness.” Southern Folklore 55.2 (1998): 181–204. Mitchell, Kenneth, ed. A Taste of Singapore. Hong Kong: Four Corners Publishing Co. (Far East) Ltd. in association with South China Morning Post, 1980. Oon, Violet. World Peranakan Cookbook. Singapore: Times Periodicals, 1978. -----. Singapore: 101 Meals. Singapore: Singapore Tourist Promotion Board, 1986. -----. Violet Oon Cooks. Singapore: Ultra Violet, 1992. -----. Timeless Recipes. Singapore: International Enterprise Singapore, 1997. -----. A Singapore Family Cookbook. Singapore: Pen International, 1998. Reisz, Emma. “City as Garden: Shared Space in the Urban Botanic Gardens of Singapore and Malaysia, 1786–2000.” Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. Eds. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Yeo Wei Wei. New York: Routledge, 2003: 123–48. Singapore Government. Singapore Annual Report on Tourism Statistics. Singapore: Singapore Government, 2012. Suen, Wong Hong. Wartime Kitchen: Food and Eating in Singapore 1942-1950. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet & National Museum of Singapore, 2009. Tan, Annette. Savour Chinatown: Stories, Memories & Recipes. Singapore: Ate Ideas, 2012. Tan, Cheryl Lu-Lien. A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family. New York: Hyperion, 2011. Tan, Sylvia. Singapore Heritage Food: Yesterday’s Recipes for Today’s Cooks. Singapore: Landmark Books, 2004. Tan, Terry. Stir-Fried and Not Shaken: A Nostalgic Trip Down Singapore’s Memory Lane. Singapore: Monsoon, 2009. Tarulevicz, Nicole. Eating Her Curries and Kway: A Cultural History of Food in Singapore. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 2013. Tay, Leslie. ieat·ishoot·ipost [blog] (2013) 21 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.ieatishootipost.sg›. ---. The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries. Singapore: Epigram Books, 2010. Time Out Singapore. “Food for Thought (National Museum).” Time Out Singapore 8 July (2013). 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.timeoutsingapore.com/restaurants/asian/food-for-thought-national-museum›. Tully, Joyceline, and Tan, Christopher. Heritage Feasts: A Collection of Singapore Family Recipes. Singapore: Miele/Ate Media, 2010. Wine & Dine: The Art of Good Living (Nov. 2013). 19 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.wineanddine.com.sg›. Wine & Dine. “About Us: The Living Legacy.” Wine & Dine (Nov. 2013). 19 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.wineanddine.com.sg/about-us› Wolf, E. “Culinary Tourism: A Tasty Economic Proposition.” (2002) 23 Nov. 2011 ‹http://www.culinary tourism.org›.Yeong, Yee Soo. Singapore Cooking. Singapore: Eastern Universities P, c.1976. Yeung, Sylvester, James Wong, and Edmond Ko. “Preferred Shopping Destination: Hong Kong Versus Singapore.” International Journal of Tourism Research 6.2 (2004): 85–96. Acknowledgements Research to complete this article was supported by Central Queensland University, Australia, under its Outside Studies Program (OSPRO) and Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre (LTERC). An earlier version of part of this article was presented at the 2nd Australasian Regional Food Networks and Cultures Conference, in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, Australia, 11–14 November 2012. The delegates of that conference and expert reviewers of this article offered some excellent suggestions regarding strengthening this article and their advice was much appreciated. All errors are, of course, my own.

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Bailey, Linda. Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein. Illustrated by Júlia Sardà. Tundra Books, 2018. The subject of this book is the story-behind-the-story of Dr Frankenstein and his terrible creature. It is the story of how an 18-year-old girl came to write one of the best-known novels of all time, inspired by a friendly competition among a group of friends that included two of the most famous authors of the age (Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron). While on summer vacation in 1816, staying at Villa Diodati (a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva), a dark and stormy night offered the ideal setting for Lord Byron to read aloud from a book of ghoulish stories called Fantasmagoriana and inspired him to propose a friendly competition in which each member of the assembled party would write a ghost story. Although it would take her almost a year to complete the novel, this competition was the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In a preface to the third edition, written many years later, the author describes these events to explain how a young girl “came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea.” Inspired by Mary Shelley’s preface, Linda Bailey has reimagined this well-known history in a way that is very relatable for young readers. Bailey explores some of the formative moments in Mary’s childhood—in particular, the death of her mother when she was only 11 days old—and some of recent scientific discoveries that were challenging old ideas, all to explain how Mary could imagine a creature “made of dead body parts, stretched out—and coming to life.” While not at all suitable for very young or very sensitive readers, this story will be inspiring for some. Perhaps the best part of the book, the gorgeously stylized illustrations by Júlia Sardà are powerfully evocative. Like the text, the illustrations are darkly appropriate reflections of Mary’s story without being overly gruesome. This is a wonderful book for the right reader. Tundra is marketing this book as being suitable for children aged 5-8, but the subject matter will be too dark for many in this age group. Somewhat older children may be better equipped to deal with the difficult elements of the story and they may be interested in the research notes at the back of the book. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Linda Quirk Linda taught courses in Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a librarian at University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections.

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Shapiro, Simon and Sheryl Shapiro. What Can You Do with Only One Shoe: Reuse, Recycle, Reinvent. Illus. Francis Black. Toronto: Annick Press, 2014. Print.The publisher is promoting this charmingly-illustrated book as one intended to inspire a practical and constructive response to the environmental concerns with which we all must grapple. It is a theme which is oddly underrepresented in children’s books, perhaps because it is difficult to craft an approach which is empowering.This book considers popular contemporary ideas about recycling/repurposing everyday objects which have outlived their initial purpose, but it is not the do-it-yourself handbook that it appears to be. Instead, it is a collection of juvenile short poems with a humorously entertaining tone, but no clear message. Clearly, we should not judge this book by its title or by its covers. One poem makes fun of a toilet-turned-into-a-planter and offered as a gift, while another offers a range of silly suggested uses for a single shoe, including flattening pancakes. There is a poem which describes a tractor pulling a “broom propeller” for street sweeping which doesn’t work very well (“pebbles flying left and right”) and another in which a dog made of bicycle parts is less than satisfying (“he can’t lick my nose”). There are some poems with a less mocking tone, but which offer suggestions that are even more absurd, such as children making musical instruments from rusty cans retrieved from a landfill site or children building their own playground, complete with a swing and a slide, from an old ambulance. Intended for children aged 5-8 years old, I wonder what young readers would make of these poems.The illustrations by Francis Blake are by far the best feature of this book. Going well beyond what is found in the poems, the illustrator has created a marvelous cast of characters that are expressive in a way that is both quirky and charming. While the illustrations deserve four stars out of four, the text certainly does not.Not recommended: 1 star out of 4 Reviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become the Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have been forgotten by history.

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Bouchard, David. Voices from the Wild: An Animal Sensagoria. Paintings by Ron Parker. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2013. Print.This gorgeous book brings together two extraordinarily-talented individuals. David Bouchard is a former teacher, a former president of the Metis Nation of Greater Victoria, a recipient of the Order of Canada, and the author of many books. His popular books use poetry, prose, and visual elements to explore Aboriginal and Métis culture and traditions in both French and English. Ron Parker is one of Canada’s best wildlife artists. His career took off in the 1990s when his realistic portraits of animals in their natural habitats stood alongside those of Robert Bateman and helped to create a very hot market for signed limited edition prints. The publisher is to be applauded for thinking of bringing together Parker’s glorious paintings and Bouchard’s inspiring poetry. It was a wonderful idea, but, unfortunately, it was not well executed. It is most unfortunate that Parker’s beautiful images were not packaged in a fresher and more contemporary book design, one that would appeal to today’s young people. The author says that he “wrote this book with young people in mind” and certainly he has organized his poetry into a familiar scheme for a children’s book—sections which explore the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste)—but unfortunately, the scheme is too childish for young adults while the poetry is too sophisticated for small children. There is great value and power in this poetry, in which the reader is asked to see the world through the senses and perspectives of numerous animals, but, just who is the intended audience?As it is, this volume does a disservice to both the author and the artist. The design may be appealing to parents or teachers of a certain age—who may feel a nostalgic affection for its familiar, if outdated, style, and who will be undaunted by the poetry—but the publisher has made a mistake in marketing this title as a children’s book. As it is, this book stands outside of normal publishing categories. Although too small to be classified as a coffee table book, both the design and the content seem more aligned with that category than any other. Although there is a great deal to applaud here, I cannot recommend this as a children’s book.Not recommended: one star out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become the Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have been forgotten by history.

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Wife (1975) is a novel ostensibly about immigration, but it is also about gender, ethnicity, and power. Bharati Mukherjee's well-known essay, "An Invisible Woman" (1981), describes her experience in Canada as one that created "double vision" because her self-perception was put so utterly at odds with her social standing (39). She experienced intense and horrifying racism in Canada, particularly in Toronto, and claims that the setting of Wife, her third novel, is "in the mind of the heroine...always Toronto" (39). Mukherjee concludes the article by saying that she eventually left Toronto, and Canada, because she was unable to keep her "twin halves" together (40). In thinking about "mixing," Mukherjee’s work provides entry points into "mixed" or interlocking structures of domination; the diasporic female subject in Mukherjee’s Wife struggles to translate this powerful "mix" in her attempt to move across and within national borders, feminisms, and cultural difference. "An Invisible Woman", in many ways, illuminates the issues that are at stake in Mukherjee's Wife. The protagonist Dimple Dagsputa, like Mukherjee, experiences identity crisis through the cultural forces that powerfully shape her self-perception and deny her access to control of her own life. I want to argue that Wife is also about Dimple's ability to grasp at power through the connections that she establishes between her mind and body, despite the social forces that attempt to divide her. Through a discussion of Dimple's negotiations with Western feminisms and the methods by which she attempts to reclaim her commodified body, I will rethink Dimple's violent response as an act of agency and resistance. Diasporic Feminisms: Locating the Subject(s): Mukherjee locates Wife in two very different geographic settings: the dusty suburbs of Calcutta and the metropolis of New York City. Dimple’s experience as a diasporic subject, one who must relocate and find a new social/cultural space, is highly problematic. Mukherjee uses this diasporic position to bring Dimple’s ongoing identity formation into relief. As she crosses into the space of New York City, Dimple must negotiate the web created by gender, class, and race in her Bengali culture with an increasingly multiple grid of inseparable subject positions. Avtar Brah points out that diaspora is useful as a "conceptual grid" where "multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed" (208). Brah points to experience as the site of subject formation; a discursive space where different subject positions are inscribed, repeated, or contested. For Brah, and for Mukherjee, it is essential to ask what the "fields of signification and representation" are that contribute to the formation of differing subjects (116). Dimple’s commodification and her submission to naming in the Bengali context are challenged when she encounters Western feminisms. Yet Mukherjee suggests that these feminisms do little to "liberate" Dimple, and in fact serve as another aspect of her oppression. Wife is concerned with the processes which lead up to Dimple’s final act of murder; the interlocking subject positions which she negotiates with in an attempt to control her own life. Dimple believes that the freedom offered by immigration will give her a new identity: "She did not want to carry any relics from her old life; given another chance she could be a more exciting person, take evening classes perhaps, become a librarian" (42). She is extremely optimistic about the opportunities of her new life, but Mukherjee does not valourize the New World over the Old. In fact, she continually demonstrates the limited spaces that are offered on both sides of the globe. In New York, Dimple faces the unresolved dilemma between her desire to be a traditional Indian wife and the lure of Western feminism. Her inability to find a liveable place within the crossings of these positions contributes to her ultimate act of violence. At her first party in Manhattan, Dimple encounters the diaspora of Indian and Pakistani immigrants who provide varying examples of the ways in which being "Indian" is in conversation with being "American." She hears about Ina Mullick, the Bengali wife whose careless husband has allowed her to become "more American than the Americans" (68). Dimple quickly learns that Amit is sharply disapproving of women who go to college, wear pants, and smoke cigarettes: "with so many Indians around and a television and a child, a woman shouldn’t have time to get any crazy ideas" (69). The options of education and employment are removed from Dimple’s grasp as soon as she begins to consider them, leaving her wondering what her new role in this place will be. Mukherjee inserts Ina Mullick into Dimple’s life as a challenge to the restrictions of traditional wifehood: "Well Dimple...what do you do all day? You must be bored out of your skull" (76). Ina has adopted what Jyoti calls "women’s lib stuff" and Dimple is warned of her "dangerous" influence (76). Ina engagement with Western feminisms is a form of resistance to the confines of traditional Bengali wifehood. Mukherjee, however, uses Ina’s character to demonstrate the misfit between Western and Third World feminisms. Although the oppressions experienced in both geographies appear to be similar, Mukherjee points out that neither Ina nor Dimple can find expression through a feminism that forces them to abandon their Indianess. Western feminist discourse has been much maligned for its Eurocentric construction of a monolithic Third World subject that ignores cultural complexity. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s "Under Western Eyes" (1988) is the classic example of the interrogation of this construction. Mohanty argues that "ethnocentric universality" obliterates the differences within the varied category of female (197), and that "Western feminist writings on women in the third world subscribe to a variety of methodologies to demonstrate the universal cross-cultural operation of male dominance and female exploitation" (208-209). Mukherjee addresses these problems through Ina’s struggle; Western feminisms and their apparent "liberation" fail to provide Ina with a satisfying sense of self. Ina remains oppressed because these forms of feminism cannot adequately deal with the web of cultural and social crossings that constitute her position as simultaneously "Indian" and "American." The patriarchy that Ina and Dimple experience is not simply that of the industrialized first world; they must also grapple with the ways in which they have been named by their own specific cultural context. Mohanty argues that there is no hom*ogenous group called "women," and Mukherjee seems to agree by demonstrating that women's subject positions are varied and multi-layered. Ina’s apparently comfortable assimilation is soon upset by desperate confessions of her unease and depression. She contrasts her "before" and "after" self in caricatures of a woman in a sari and a woman in a bikini. These drawings represent, "the great moral and physical change, and all that" (95). Mukherjee suggests, however, that the change has been less than satisfactory for Ina, "‘I think it is better to stay a Before, if you can’...’Our trouble here is that we imitate badly, and we preserve things even worse’" (95). Ina’s confession alludes to her belief that she is copying, rather than actually living, a life which might be empowering. She has been forced to give up the "before" because it clashes with the ideal that she has constructed of the liberated Western woman. In accepting the oppositions between East and West, Ina pre-empts the possibility of being both. Though Dimple is fascinated by the options that Ina represents, and begins to question her own happiness, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the absolutes that Ina insists upon. Ina’s feminist friends frighten Dimple because of their inability to understand her; they come to represent a part of the American landscape that Dimple has come to fear through her mediated experience of American culture through the television and lifestyle magazines. Leni Anspach’s naked gums, "horribly pink and shiny, like secret lips, only more lecherous and lethal, set themselves up as enemies of decent, parsimonious living" (152). Leni’s discourse threatens to obliterate any knowledge that Dimple has of herself and her only resistance to this is an ironic reversal of her subservient role: "After Leni removed her cup Dimple kept on pouring, over the rim of Leni’s cup, over the tray and the floating dentures till the pregnant-bellied tea pot was emptied" (152). Dimple’s response to the lack of accommodation that Western feminism presents is tied to her feeling that Ina and Leni live with unforgiving extremes: "that was the trouble with people like Leni and Ina who believed in frankness, happiness and freedom; they lacked tolerance, and they abhorred discussions about the weather" (161). Like Amit, Ina offers a space through her example where Dimple cannot easily learn to negotiate her options. The dynamic between these women is ultimately explosive. Ina cannot accept Dimple’s choices and Dimple is forced to simplify herself in a defence that protects her from predatory Western feminisms: I can’t keep up with you people. I haven’t read the same kinds of books or anything. You know what I mean Ina, don’t you? I just like to cook and watch TV and embroider’...’Bravo!’ cried Ina Mullick from the sofa where she was sitting cross legged. ‘And what else does our little housewife do? ‘You’re making fun of me,’ Dimple screamed. ‘Who do you think you are?’ (169-170. Dimple lacks the ability to articulate her oppression; Ina Mullick can articulate it but cannot move outside of it. Both women feel anger, depression, and helplessness, but they fail to connect and help one another. Mukherjee demonstrates that women from the Third World, specifically those who come into contact with the diaspora, are not hom*ogenous subjects; her various representations of negotiation with processes of identity constitution show how different knowledges of self are internalized and acted out. Irene Gedalof’s recent work on bringing Indian and Western feminisms into conversation proceeds from the Foucauldian notion that these multiple discursive systems must prevail over the study of woman or women within a single (and limiting) symbolic order (26). The postcolonial condition of diaspora, Gedalof and other critics have pointed out, is an interesting position from which to begin talking about these complex processes of identity making since it breaks down the oppositions of South and North, East and West. In crossing the South/North and East/West divide, Dimple does not abandon her Indian subject position, but rather attempts to keep it intact as other social forces are presented. The opposition between Ina and Dimple, however, is dissolved by the flux that the symbol "woman" experiences. This process emphasizes differences within and between their experiences in a non-hierarchical way. Rethinking the Mind/Body Dichotomy: Dimple’s Response This section will attempt to show how Dimple’s response to her options is far more complex than the mind/body dichotomy that it appears to be upon superficial examination. Dimple’s body does not murder in an act of senseless violence that is divorced from her mental perception of the world. I want to rethink interpretations like the one offered by Emmanuel S. Nelson: "Wife describes a weak-minded Bengali woman [whose]...sensibilities become so confounded by her changing cultural roles, the insidious television factitiousness, and the tensions of feminism that, ironically, she goes mad and kill her husband" (54-55). Although her sense of reality and fantasy become blurred, Dimple acts in accordance with the few choices that remain open to her. In slowly guiding us toward Dimple’s horrifying act of violence, Mukherjee attempts to examine the social and cultural networks which condition her response. The absolutes of Western feminisms offer little space for resistance. Dimple, however, is not a victim of her circ*mstances. She reclaims her body as a site of inscription and commodification through methods of resistance which are inaccessible to Amit or her larger social contexts: abortion, vomiting, fantasies of mutilating her physical self, and, ultimately, through using her body as a tool, rather than an object, of violence. These actions are responses to her own lack of power over self representation; Dimple creates a private world in which she can resist the ways her body has been encoded and the ways in which she has been constructed as a divided object. In her work on the body in feminist discourse, Elizabeth Grosz argues that postructuralist feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Judith Butler conceptualize female bodies as: "crucial to understanding women’s psychical and social existence, but the body is no longer understood as an ahistorical, biologically given, acultural object. They are concerned with the lived body, the body insofar as it is represented and used in specific ways in particular cultures" (Grosz 18). In emphasizing difference within the sexes, these postructuralist thinkers reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and do much for Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s project of considering the ways in which "woman" is a heterogenously constructed and shifting category. Mukherjee presents Dimple’s body as a "social body": a "social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification and power" (Grosz 18-19). Dimple cannot control, for example, Amit’s desire to impregnate her, to impose a schema of patriarchal reproduction on her body. Yet, as I will demonstrate, Dimple resists in ways that she cannot articulate but she is strongly aware that controlling the mappings of her body gives her some kind of power. This novel demonstrates how the dualisms of patriarchal discourse operate, but I want to read Dimple’s response as a reclaiming of the uncontrollable body; her power is exercised through what Deleuze and Guattari would call the "rhizomatic" connections between her body and mind. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), provides a miscellany of theory which, "flattens out the relations between the social and the psychical," and privileges neither (Grosz 180). Deleuze and Guattari favour maps and rhizomes as conceptual models, so that all things are open, connectable, and subject to constant modification (12). I want to think of Dimple as an assemblage, a rhizomatic structure that increases in the dimensions of a multiplicity that changes as it expands its connections (8). She is able to resist precisely because her body and mind are inseparable and fluid entities. Her violence toward Amit is a bodily act but it cannot be read in isolation; Mukherjee insists that we also understand the mental processes that preface this act. Dimple’s vomit is one of the most powerful tropes in the novel. It is a rejection and a resistance; it is a means of control while paradoxically suggesting a lack of control. Julia Kristeva is concerned with bodily fluids (blood, vomit, saliva, tears, seminal fluid) as "abjections" which necessarily, "partake of both polarized terms [subject/object, inside/outside] but cannot be clearly identified with either" (Grosz 192). Vomiting, then, is the first act that Dimple uses as a means of connecting the mind and body that she has been taught to know only separately. Vomiting is an abjection that signifies Dimple's rhizomatic fluidity; it is the open and changeable path that denies the split between her mind and her body that her social experiences attempt to enforce. Mukherjee devotes large sections of the narrative to this act, bringing the reader into a private space where one is forced to see, smell, and taste Dimple’s defiance. She initially discovers her ability to control her vomit when she is pregnant. At first it is an involuntary act, but she soon takes charge of her body’s rejections: The vomit fascinated her. It was hers; she was locked in the bathroom expelling brownish liquid from her body...In her arrogance, she thrust her fingers deep inside her mouth, once jabbing a squishy organ she supposed was her tonsil, and drew her finger in and out in smooth hard strokes until she collapsed with vomiting (31) Dimple’s vomiting does contain an element of pathos which is somewhat problematic; one might read her only as a victim because her pathetic grasp at power is reduced to the pride she feels in her bodily expulsions. Mukherjee’s text, however, begs the reader to read Dimple carefully. Dimple acts through her body, often with horrible consequences, but she is resisting in the only way that she is able. In New York, as Dimple encounters an increasingly complicated sociocultural matrix, she fights to find a space between her role as a loyal Indian wife and the apparent temptations of the United States. Ina Mullick’s Western feminism asks her to abandon her Bengali self, and Amit asks her to retain it. In the face of these absolutes, Dimple continues to attempt her resistance through her body, but it is often weak and ineffectual: "But instead of the great gush Dimple had hoped for, only a thin trickle was expelled. It gravitated toward the drain, a small slimy pool full of bubbles. She was ashamed of it; it seemed more impersonal than a cooking stain" (150). Mukherjee asks us to read Dimple through her abjections--through both mind and body (not entirely distinct entities for Mukherjee)--in order to understand the murder. We must gauge Dimple's actions through the open and connectable relationships of body and mind. Her inability to vomit "pleasurably" signifies a growing inability to locate a space that is tolerable. Vomiting becomes a way for Dimple to tie her multiple subject positions together: "Vomiting could be pleasurable; thinking of all the bathrooms she had vomited in she felt nostalgic, almost middle-aged" (149). This moment at the kitchen sink occurs when Leni and Ina have fractured her sense of a stable Indian identity. In an interview, Mukherjee admits that Dimple’s movement to the United States means that she begins to ask questions about her oppression; she begins to ask herself questions about her own happiness (Hanco*ck 44). These questions, coupled with Leni and Ina’s challenging presence, leads to Dimple to desire a reconnection and a sense of control. Undoubtedly, Dimple’s act of murder is misguided, but Mukherjee sensitively demonstrates that Dimple has very little choice left. Dimple does not simply break down into a body and mind that are unaware of their connections, rather she begins to operate on several levels of consciousness. Shen Mei Ma interprets Dimple’s condition as schizophrenic, and explores this as a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literatures. She uses R.D. Laing’s classic explanation of schizophrenia as a working definition: The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world, and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself...Moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as ‘split’ in various ways, perhaps a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on (Ma 43) Ma analyses this condition (which can be seen, like gender and race, as a socially constructed state of being), as a "defense mechanism" against an unbearable world; the separation in space and memory that the diasporic subject experiences results in a schizophrenic, or divisive, tendency. I agree with Ma's use of Laing's definition of schizophrenia in the sense that this understanding is certainly more useful than Emmanuel Nelson's insistence on Dimple's "madness." Reading Dimple's response with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual rhizomes, however, leads me to resist using a definition that is linked to mental illness. This may be a prominent trope in Asian diaspora literature, but it is also necessary, and perhaps more useful, to recognize that Dimple's act of violence and her debatable "madness" are ultimately less important than reading her negotiation as a means of survival and her response as an act of resistance. Many critics interpret the final act of murder as "an ironic twist of Sati, the traditional self-immolation of an Indian wife on the funeral pyre of her husband" (Ma 58). This suggestion draws up Dimple’s teenage desire to be like Sita, "the ideal wife of Hindu legends" who walks through fire for her husband (6). The violence perpetrated against women who naturalize Sita’s tradition is wrenched into an act in which Dimple is able to exercise some control over her fate. The act of murder is woven with the alternate text of industrial/commercial culture in a way that demonstrates Dimple’s desperate negotiation with the options available to her: The knife stabbed the magical circle once, twice, seven times, each time a little harder, until the milk in the bowl of cereal was a pretty pink and the flakes were mushy and would have embarrassed any advertiser, and then she saw the head fall off - but of course it was her imagination because she was not sure anymore what she had seen on TV and what she had seen in the private screen of three A.M. (212-213) The tragedy of this conclusion surely lies in the events that are left unsaid: what is Dimple’s fate and how will society deal with her violent choice? Ma’s article on schizophrenia points to the most likely outcome--Dimple will be declared insane and "treated" for her illness. Yet my reading of this act has attempted to access a careful understanding of how Dimple is constructed and how this can contribute to rethinking her violent response. Dimple's mind is not an insane one; her body is not an uncontrollable, hysterical one. Murder is a choice for Dimple--albeit a choice that is exercised in a limited and oppressive space. "Mixing" is an urgent topic; as globalization and capitalist hom*ogenization make the theorization of diaspora increasingly necessary, it is essential to consider how gendered and raced subject positions are constituted and how they are reproduced within and across geographies. This novel is important because it forces the reader to ask the difficult questions about "mixing" that precede Dimple’s act of spousal violence. I have attempted to address these questions in my discussion of Dimple’s negotiations and her resistance. Much has been written about this novel in terms of Dimple’s "split," but very few critics have tried to examine Dimple’s character in ways that penetrate our limited third person access to her. Mukherjee’s own writing in "An Invisible Woman" suggests the urgency of rethinking characters like Dimple and the particular complexities of immigration for non-English speaking housewives. Mukherjee’s relative position of privilege has given her access to far more choices than Dimple has, but notably, she avoids turning Dimple’s often suicidal violence inward. Instead, Mukherjee shows how the inward is inescapable from the outward: in murdering Amit, the violence Dimple perpetrates is, after all, a rearticulation of the violence from which her limited subject position cannot completely escape. Footnote: In thinking about Dimple's response, it is important to note that, of course, her actions and her words are always conditioned by the position that she has naturalized. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"(1988) argues that the subaltern subject cannot "speak" because no act of resistance occurs that can be separated from the dominant discourse that provides the language and the conceptual categories with which the subaltern voice speaks (Ashcroft et al 1998 217-218).The violence of Dimple's response must be seen as an ironic subversion of a television world that enforces patriarchal norms. References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. Brah, Avtar.Cartographies of Diaspora - Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980. Gedalof, Irene. Against Purity - Rethinking Idenity With Indian and Western Feminisms. London: Routledge, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies - Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Ma, Sheng-mei. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State U of NY P, 1998. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220. Mukherjee, Bharati. Wife. Toronto: Penguin, 1975. -- "An Invisible Woman." Saturday Night 1981, 96: 36-40. Nelson, Emmanual S. Writers of the Indian Diaspora - A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, eds. NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993: 196-220.