`No Place Like Home': The Ambivalent Rhetoric of Hospitality in the Work of Simone Lazaroo, Arlene Chai, and Hsu-Ming Teo

Author: Madsen, Deborah

Source: Journal of Intercultural Studies, Volume 27, Numbers 1-2, -02/February–May 2006 , pp. 117-132(16)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

Purchase options

The full text electronic article is available for purchase. You will be able to download the full text electronic article after payment.

$36.48 plus tax Refund Policy

More about this publication?

More like this?

In this: publication
By this: publisher
In this Subject: Anthropology & Archeology
By this author: Madsen, Deborah

Content Key:

- Free

- New

- Open Access

- Subscribed

- Free Trial

Abstract:

This essay addresses the `neither here nor there' rhetoric of not belonging in Anglophone Chinese Australian literature. Jacques Derrida's recent work on hospitality and cosmopolitanism, together with Ien Ang's work on being `hosted' as an Asian person in Australia, provides a theoretical framework to approach recent Chinese Australian texts such as Simone Lazaroo's The World Waiting to be Made , Arlene Chai's The Last Time I Saw Mother , and Hsu-Ming Teo's Behind the Moon . My analyslis highlights the ambivalence that surrounds ideas of `home' in the context of migration (Lazaroo), the return to `homeland' (Chai), and the refugee experience (Teo), as nationalism asserts itself as a force that denies true belonging to those who are nonetheless `hosted'.

Keywords: Homeland; Citizenship; Diaspora; Australian Migration; Asylum; Multiculturalism; Literary Canon

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/07256860600607876