Phantom limbs and cultural ventriloquism: communicating cultural difference as a novelist

Abstract

This essay considers the ‘phantom presences’ that shadow attempts by novelists in contemporary Australia to communicate within and across cultures. Cross-cultural communication is haunted by ‘phantom limbs’ in all sorts of ways: the phantom limb of the revenant white nation, the phantom limbs of various cultures migrants left behind, and the phantom limb of ‘home’ – of ‘landscapes [which] ache in all places of departures’. The essay explores technical issues of cultural representation – a process which ultimately cannot avoid problematic constructions of self-orientalising ethnicity. I explain the personal context through which my novels Love and Vertigo (2000) and Behind the Moon (2005) were produced and the historical context of the novels’ publication. I then consider the content of multicultural/ethnic Australian fiction within the broader context of Australian history, looking at how this legacy – a legacy of phantom presences – shapes cross-cultural writing as well as responses to this genre of fiction.

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