AustLit

'While substantial attention has been paid to the depiction of racial and cultural othering experienced by middle-class female Indian immigrants in the Global North, this article grapples with a rare figure in the fiction of the Indian diaspora: a female immigrant employed as a live-in domestic worker. By focusing on the novel Jasmine (1989) by Bharati Mukherjee and two short stories, “A Pocket Full of Stories” (2009) by Sujatha Fernandes and “Almost Valentine’s Day” (2014) by Mridula Koshy, the article examines how these divergent representations of domestic servitude complicate prevailing interpretations of the Indian diasporic experience, particularly by requiring an engagement with the complex intersection of class, race and gendered identities. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, with their contrasting ideological underpinnings, the three works compel readers to revisit the myth and reality of upward social mobility, and to reconceptualize the meaning of integration and exclusion in a transnational context.' (Publication abstract)

'There are many ways to read as rich and detailed a book as Marilla North’s Yarn Spinners: A Story of Friendship, Politics and a Shared Commitment to a Distinctive Australian Literature, Woven through the Letters of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Miles Franklin and their Congenials, an updated and substantial reworking of Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters – Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Miles Franklin (2001). North herself suggests one approach when, in an online interview, she describes how she developed the earlier collection of selected correspondence among three mid-20th-century Australian literatae into a more complex “hybrid text” or “biographical narrative” involving a good deal of “detective work” to fill in chronological gaps among the letters. As a result, you may start the book on the opening page, as you would a novel, and follow the three “politically active” eponymous characters as, on either side of World War II, they negotiate their way through several decades of ups and downs with one another, publishers, family members, assorted friends and rival writers, government bureaucrats and a host of other figures in their determination to play a part in creating and defending “an authentic and truly Australian literature” (17).' (Introduction)