"The root of all evil"? Transnational cosmopolitanism in the fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlinda Bobis

Bibliographic Data

ID2179052
AuthorsPaul Giffard-Foret
Year2016
Volume52
Issue5
Pages595-609
Publication date2016-09-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2016.1202561
OpenAlexW2478081459
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited18

This article exposes the contradictions of cosmopolitan citizenship and world peace in novels by three Southeast Asian Australian women authors. Their fiction questions the viability of transnational sisterhood in an age of humanitarian intervention where women and children have become pawns for renewed western imperialist ventures. This article asks in turn whether the incommensurable space opened up by the failures of various forms of what Stuart Hall calls cosmopolitanism "from above" can be reinvested through "reading up the ladder of privilege", as proposed by Chandra T. Mohanty. Simone Lazaroo's Sustenance (2010) and Merlinda Bobis's The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) build "grass-roots" forms of cosmopolitanism and touristic hospitality designed to redress the many evils of contemporary postcolonial societies. The Root of all Evil (1987) by Dewi Anggraeni objects to the Spivakian native informant and upwardly mobile migrant woman's imperious desire to help her homeland's subaltern female underclass, in light of the latter's lack of agency and the harm such intervention may cause

Agency (philosophy · Alien · Citizenship · Cosmopolitanism · Homeland · Hospitality · Political science · Politics · Privilege (computing · Rapture · Redress · Social science · Sociology · Subaltern · Sustenance · Tourism · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Gender Studies · History · Law

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