Abstract
Sri Lankan-Australian women writers have left their stamp on Australian fiction, from the ground-breaking first novel, A Change of Skies by Yasmine Gooneratne, in 1992, to the narratives of 2014 Miles Franklin Award recipient Michelle de Kretser. Among these novels that address the migrant’s cultural dilemma and accommodation, the novels by Chandani Lokugé demand attention. Lokugé has published three novels. This chapter examines the aspects of water and music flowing through Lokugé’s fiction to transformative new horizons and how these validate the concept of the transnation. Diversity of voices in literature is important in the contemporary public sphere in Australia and the chapter contributes towards addressing an elision in Australian discourse.
Acknowledgement This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
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Notes
- 1.
She completed her PhD in English Literature at Flinders University in 1996. Currently an associate professor in English, Lokugé is the founding and continuing director of the Centre for Postcolonial Writing and Head of the Creative Writing programme at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. She was series editor for the Oxford Classics Reissues Series at Oxford University Press from 1998 until 2008.
- 2.
Bill Ashcroft, “Australian Transnation”, Modern Mobilities: Australian-Transnational Writing, David Brooks (ed), Southerly, vol 71, no. 1, (Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012), 39.
- 3.
Bill Ashcroft, “The ambiguous necessity of utopia: Post-colonial literatures and the persistence of hope”, Social Alternatives, vol. 28, no. 3, (2009), 8–14.
- 4.
Rundle, my interview. From the transcript of my audio recorded interview with Chandani Lokugé on 29/9/2013 at Monash University, Carlton, Victoria, Australia.
- 5.
Bill Ashcroft, “Alternative modernities: globalization and the post-colonial”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 40, no. 1. (The John Hopkins University Press, 2009).
- 6.
Devleena Ghosh, “I didn’t eat the baby, the dingo ate the baby: Transnational South Asians in Australia”, in Ties to the Homeland: Second Generation Transnationalism Helen Lee (ed) (UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 181–196.
- 7.
Bill Ashcroft, “The horizon of the future”, Southerly, vol. 74, no. 1, (Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2014), 12–35, 13.
- 8.
Chandani Lokugé, Turtle Nest (Melbourne: Penguin Australia, 2003), 42.
- 9.
Rundle, my interview (2013).
- 10.
Chandani Lokugé, Turtle Nest, 42.
- 11.
Lokugé, ibid, 14.
- 12.
Lokugé, ibid, 228–229.
- 13.
Chandani Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled, (Melbourne: Penguin, 2000).
- 14.
Rundle, my interview (2013).
- 15.
Rundle, ibid.
- 16.
Chandani Lokugé, “Journey into vishranti: A Critico-Autobiographical Reflection on Diasporic Dis-belonging”, Interventions, vol. 13, no. 3, (2011), 483–94.
- 17.
Lokugé, “Journey into vishranti”, 487.
- 18.
Lokugé, “Journey into vishranti”, 487.
- 19.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas. Trans. W R Boyce Gibson, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).
- 20.
Marianne Sawicki, “Edmund Husserl (1859—1938)”, in “5. Ideas I (Ideen I, 1913)”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <www.iep.utm.edu/husserl/>, (viewed 4/8/2015).
- 21.
Husserl, 1960, in Sawicki, ibid, 21.
- 22.
Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled, 17.
- 23.
Lokugé, ibid, 74.
- 24.
Husserl 1973, sec. 8, in Sawicki.
- 25.
Husserl, ibid.
- 26.
Ashcroft, “The horizon of the future” (2014), 12–35, 21.
- 27.
Ashcroft, “Australian Transnation”, 39.
- 28.
Lokugé, Turtle Nest, 1.
- 29.
Ashcroft, “The horizon of the future”, 20.
- 30.
Lokugé, Turtle Nest, 241.
- 31.
Chandani Lokugé, “Waters of desire”, Meanjin, vol. 66, no. 2, (Sydney: 2007, 25).
- 32.
Lokugé, ibid, 26.
- 33.
Lokugé, ibid, 30.
- 34.
Gillian Dooley, “Illusive Beauty: ‘Softly, as I Leave You’ Review.” Australian Book Review 338. February: 1, (Sydney: 2012).
- 35.
S W Perera, “Sri Lanka” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Introduction, September 2001; vol. 36, 3. (US: SAGE Publications International, 2011), 215–231, 215.
- 36.
Rundle, my interview (2013).
- 37.
Rundle, ibid.
- 38.
Rundle, ibid.
- 39.
Lokugé, Turtle Nest, 150.
- 40.
Rajender Kaur, “Review of Softly As I Leave You by Chandani Lokugé”, Transnational Literature vol. 5 no. 2, (May 2013). Print and online, <http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html>.
- 41.
Ashcroft, “The horizon of the future”, 20.
- 42.
Rundle, my interview.
- 43.
Rundle, ibid.
- 44.
Rundle, ibid.
- 45.
Rundle, ibid.
- 46.
Ashcroft, “The ambiguous necessity of utopia: Post-colonial literatures and the persistence of hope”, [Paper in special issue: Utopias Dystopias, Alternative Visions. Archer-Lean, Clare (ed).] Social Alternatives: 28, 3 (2009): 8–14.
- 47.
Alison Broinowski, “‘Merely’ academic? Critical responses to Australian—Asian fiction”, in ANU Digital Collections. (The Australia-Netherlands Research Collaboration (ANRC), 2011, 1, 2, 4, 5, 13). <http://hdl.handle.net/1885/8278> Viewed March 2012, June 2012.
- 48.
For more about the civil war in Sri Lanka, see Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). For a timeline of Sri Lanka and the civil war please see the BBC website: <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-12004081>.
- 49.
Lokugé, Turtle Nest, 109.
- 50.
Lokugé, ibid, 138.
- 51.
Ashcroft, “Australian Transnation”, 19.
- 52.
Lokugé, Softly, as I Leave You (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012).
- 53.
Lokugé, ibid, 3–4.
- 54.
Lokugé, ibid, 138.
- 55.
Rundle, my interview.
- 56.
Rundle, ibid.
- 57.
Rundle, ibid.
- 58.
Lokugé, Softly, as I Leave You, 192.
- 59.
Rundle, my interview.
- 60.
Ashcroft, “Australian Transnation”, 39.
- 61.
Ashcroft, ibid.
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Rundle, S. (2017). Transnation and Feminine Fluidity: New Horizon in the Fiction of Chandani Lokugé. In: Das, D., Dasgupta, S. (eds) Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_19
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