There Goes the Neighbourhood!: The (Indian)-Subcontinental in the Asian/Australian Literary Precinct

[...]the article will make an argument for understanding the two-way traffic that literary transnationalism necessarily entails. What is brought into being as distinctively Australian is not a set of cultural practices, a landscape, or a different set of histories, but a single figure, the typical Australian, whose accents and attitudes stand in for the population at large' (151). [...]Australian literature, despite its myriad creative answers to the question of 'who has the right to belong' to this canon, continues to be animated by it (Huggan vii). [...]the central place that such an obsession occupies in the Australian audience is testimony, as Maria Takolander and David McCooey argue, to its continued privileging of 'real authors and literature' (57, 59). [...]while an Ern Malley hoax might represent 'a nationalist suspicion of European modernism through the character of a working class man, the Demidenko affair was decidedly 90s in its use of multicultural ideology' (60): The Demidenko hoax also reignited curiously old-fashioned ideas about Australian cultural identity. [...]energetic work done in the arena of Australian multiculturalism by cultural critics like Sneja Gunew, Jan Mayhuddin, Fazal Rizvi, came to a standstill by the mid-nineties.