This book examines haunting in terms of trauma, languaging, and the supernatural in works by Chinese Australian writers born in Australia, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. It goes beyond the conventional focus on identity issues in the analysis of diasporic writing, considering how the memory of past trauma is triggered by abusive systems of power in the present. The author unpacks how trauma also brings past violence to haunt the present. This book considers how different Chinese diasporic communities present a dynamic and multiple state through partial erasure between different Chinese subcultures and other cultures. Showing the supernatural as a social and cultural product, this book elucidates how haunting as the supernatural refers to the coexistence of, and the competition between, different cultures and powers. It takes a wide-ranging view of different diasporic communities under the banner ‘Chinese’, a term that refers not only to Chinese nationals in terms of citizenship, but also to the Chinese diaspora in terms of ancestry, and Chinese culture more generally. In analysing haunting in texts, the author positions Chinese culture as in a constant state of flux. It is relevant to literary scholars and students with interests in Australian literature, Chinese and Southeast Asian migration writing, and those with an interest in the Gothic and postcolonial traditions.

* Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, Shortlist * 2022 Stella Prize, Longlist "A Best Book of the Year" —The Guardian "A Most Anticipated book of 2022" —Entertainment Weekly With an unforgettable voice and exuberant wit, She Is Haunted is a masterful debut exploring issues of identity, connection, and loss, told with remarkable grace and assurance by Chinese/American/Australian author, Paige Clark. In stories charged by the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, grief, exes, and the profundities of friendship, She Is Haunted features injured ballerinas, cloned dogs, and competitive call centers in settings as far ranging as future and present Australia, New York City’s Chinatown, and suburban California. A mother cuts her daughter’s hair because her own hair begins falling out; a woman attempts to physically transform into her dead husband so that she does not have to grieve; a woman undergoes brain surgery in order to live more comfortably in extreme temperatures. Braiding the real and the surreal, both playfully witty and deeply insightful, these stories show us characters striving to make sense of the grand themes of family, love, death, and our changing world. She Is Haunted flags Paige Clark as a wondrous and wise new literary talent.

This book investigates issues of translation and survival in diasporic and transcultural literature, combining Chinese and Western theories of translation to discuss the centrifugal and centripetal forces that are inherent in diasporic Chinese writers. Cutting across philosophy, semiotics, translation studies and diasporic writing, it the book tackles the complexity of translation as a key tool to re-read the dynamics of Sino-Anglo literary encounters that reset East-West parameters. Focusing on a range of specialized areas of cultural translation sand China-related writings, this book is a key read for scholars of translation and cross-cultural writings, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, American and Australian literature studies, and global Chinese literature studies.

In Haunting Biology Emma Kowal recounts the troubled history of Western biological studies of Indigenous Australians and asks how we now might see contemporary genomics, especially that conducted by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scientists. Kowal illustrates how the material persistence of samples over decades and centuries folds together the fates of different scientific methodologies. Blood, bones, hair, comparative anatomy, human biology, physiology, and anthropological genetics all haunt each other across time and space, together with the many racial theories they produced and sustained. The stories Kowal tells feature a variety of ghostly presences: a dead anatomist, a fetishized piece of hair hidden away in a war trunk, and an elusive white Indigenous person. By linking this history to contemporary genomics and twenty-first-century Indigeneity, Kowal outlines the fraught complexities, perils, and potentials of studying Indigenous biological difference in the twenty-first century.

This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen to operate in the corpus of this book as a literary mode, as defined by Rosemary Jackson. Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairy tales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narratives and challenges the power of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four diasporic Chinese women authors, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adeline Yen Mah, Ying Chen and Larissa Lai, this book aims to offer critical insights into how their works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.

The book explains how multi-generational Australian-born Chinese (ABC) negotiate the balance of two cultures. It explores both the philosophical and theoretical levels, focusing on deconstructing and re-evaluating the concept of ‘Chineseness.’ At a social and experiential level, it concentrates on how successive generations of early migrants experience, negotiate and express their Chinese identity. The diasporic literature has taken up the idea of hybrid identity construction largely in relation to first- and second-generation migrants and to the sojourner’s sense of roots in a diasporic setting somewhat lost in the debate over Chinese diasporas and identities are the experiences of long-term migrant communities. Their experiences are usually discussed in terms of the melting-pot concepts of assimilation and integration that assume ethnic identification decreases and eventually disappears over successive generations. Based on ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation on multi-generational Australian-born Chinese whose families have resided in Australia from three to six generations, this study reveals a contrasting picture of ethnic identification.

Reclusive antiquarian bookseller Alan Redgrave meets Fei Yun, a beautiful and beguiling Chinese artist, at a gallery in the summer of 2018. She takes him to the ancient oasis town of Dunhuang, gateway to the Southern Silk Road. Her deep involvement with Taoist philosophy and ritual, including talismans, and her fascination with an eighteenth-century portrait lead him to wonder if there is something haunting her — or him.