‘That Old Man Making Fun of Me’: Humour in the Writings of Aboriginal and Asian Relationships

Authors

  • Daozhi Xu School of International Studies, Sun Yat-sen University

Keywords:

humour, stigmatisation, intimacy, Aboriginal and Asian relationships, race, ethnicity

Abstract

This article explores the role of humour in three contemporary Aboriginal texts that document Aboriginal–Asian relationships. Humour in Aboriginal texts has mostly been studied with reference to the ostensible binaries between Aboriginal and European, Black and White, colonised and colonisers. Scant critical attention has been paid to the place of humour in revealing and concealing the dynamic interrelations between Aboriginal people and Asian immigrants living under a colonial regime. This article investigates humour as a textual device that transmits subversive ideas contesting stigma and stereotypes of Aboriginal and Asian peoples regarding their identities, bodies, and inter-racial intimacies. Through close readings of Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise (1997), Tex and Nelly Camfoo’s autobiography Love against the Law (2000) and Anita Heiss’s historical romance Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), this article considers three specific modes of humour in Aboriginal texts: self-deprecation, puns/wit, and boasting. The article contends that these different forms of humour draw attention to a range of unsettling issues and power relations concerning oppression and resistance, stigmatisation and normalisation, institutional control and surveillance. Further in each of these texts humour works to deconstruct images of discrete and maligned racialised otherness.

Author Biography

Daozhi Xu, School of International Studies, Sun Yat-sen University

Xu Daozhi is currently a research fellow at School of International Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, a part-time lecturer at School of English, the University of Hong Kong, and a university associate with the School of Humanities, the University of Tasmania. She holds a PhD in English literary studies from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, cultural theory, children’s literature, studies of race and ethnicity, settler colonialism. Her monograph Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature (2018) won the Biennial Australian Studies in China Book Prize, awarded by Australia–China Council. It has also been shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) “Alvie Egan Award” in 2019. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Journal of Australian Studies, Australian Aboriginal Studies, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, and Antipodes, etc. She is interested in translation and has translated or co-translated several books. She is on the Executive of the International Australian Studies Association.

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Published

2019-12-24

Issue

Vol. 19 No. 2 (2019): Location and Re-locations

Section

Articles

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