“Transformations in Urban Contexts” examines how Asian-Australian women
writers of Southeast-Asian heritage complicate the interconnections between
migrants’ identity transformations and their perceptions of urban places. It takes
the form of a thematic study of nine selected texts by four writers, Singaporeanborn
Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister (1994) and Swallowing Clouds (1997); Indonesianborn
Dewi Anggraeni’s The Root of All Evil (1987), Parallel Forces (1988) and
Uncertain Step (1992); Singaporean-born Simone Lazaroo’s The World Waiting to
be Made (1994) and The Australian Fiancé (2000); and Malaysian-born Hsu-Ming
Teo’s Love and Vertigo (2000) and Behind the Moon (2005). Structuring my
textual analysis of these texts around the theoretical frameworks expounded
upon by Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity (1990), Joachim von der Thüsen’s
concept of the image-making of the city (2005), and Jacques Derrida’s idea of
conditional hospitality (2000), I argue that these Asian-Australian women’s
selected writing provides a literary space of transformation whereby ‘self’ and
‘other’ are both changed in the context of postcolonial cosmopolitanism and
urban contexts, through key interactions in identity, place and gender. Drawing
on these theories, the textual analyses identify five types of identity
transformations depicted by these Asian-Australian writers, that is,
transformations of spatial, cultural, gender, sexual and national identities. This
thesis also articulates the recurring theme, in each text, of sharply contrasting
images of the city as either a place of constraint or freedom. Aside from
examining the city as a place of transformation, this thesis shows how the texts
explore the city as a metaphor: as a place invested with meaning, and as the
location for encounters, tensions, stereotypes, exclusions, surveillance and
confinement within either or both Asian and Australian cultures. In doing this, it
makes an original contribution to the field of migrant Australian literary studies
where the connections between the city as a trope and the processes of migrant
identity-formation have not been previously explored.