“One that Returns”: Home, hantu, and spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Journal of Literary Studies
Volume
36
Issue
1
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
45272
Abstract
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.
DOI
10.1080/02564718.2020.1738719
Access Rights
subscription content
Comments
Ash, S. (2020). “One that Returns”: Home, hantu, and spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000). Journal of Literary Studies, 36(1), 112-124. https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718.2020.1738719