Interactions: Essays on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific

Interactions is a collection of essays celebrating cultural diversity in the Asia-Pacific region.

The subjects examined range from Australian-Vietnamese stand up comedy to New Guinea folk opera to Muslim perceptions of the evils of television and white Australians’ poems about Aborigines.

What the contributors share is a belief in the value of cultural interaction and the richness of writing that may emerge from it.

This book offers diverse maps of cross-cultural imagination.

Contents
Introduction	Dennis Haskell
Cultural identity in the global economy
Multiculturalism and the new world (dis)order	G. S. Jayasree
Sail the midnight sun: Cross-cultural, inter-cultural, or intra-cultural activity in the creation of a folk opera	Lynda Schulz
Shopping and cooking for the hybrid in the world waiting to be made	Mirian Lo
Expatriates and the question of home: Jill Ker Conway and Shirley Geok-lin Lim	Bruce Bennett
The ocker ethnic: Reading Hung Le and cultural identity	Tseen-Ling Khoo
The power of time, or why Thailand makes me laugh	Mark Weeks
Gender and Sexuality
The Scheherezade motif in recent Australian fiction set in China and Southseas Asia	David Brooks
Postcolonial gothic: Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Hawai’i	Heather Neilson
Parallels of motivation and cultural context in the feminist poetry of Australia and India: A comparative analysis	Subhas Chandra Saha
“In the beat of my silences”: Representations of indigeneity, gender and sexuality in the writing of Leslie Marmon Silko and Jamice Slater-Herring	Angeline O’Neill
The evils of television: Some reflections on Shahnon Ahmad’s novel Tivi	Harry Aveling
Culture and play of desire in Merlinda Bobis’ Ms Serena Serenata and Beaut, Luv!	Bill Dunstone
Travel and initiation
Crossing the shadow lines	Silvia Albertazzi
Unstable communities: The village in the short stories of Pira Sudham	Andrew McRae
Lu Xun’s medical studies in Japan and his fiction: A deconstructive reading	Wong Yoon Wah
Madame Izan, butterflies and the incomprehensible Japanese	Megumi Kato
“They couldn’t tell us how to farm their skin”: White poems on black dispossession	Geoff Page
Singapore and the two Ulysses	Rajeev S. Patke