“One that Returns”

Home, Hantu, and Spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)

Bibliographic Data

ID20156494
AuthorsSusan Ash (0000-0003-2078-7560, Edith Cowan University, Perth, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume36
Issue1
Pages112-124
Publication date2020-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387
PublisherUnisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.1080/02564718.2020.1738719
OpenAlexW3024214098
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited5

The Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature

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