Remembering and re-membering home : postcolonial poetics in 21st century Filipino, Indonesian and Vietnamese diasporic narratives

Abstract

This dissertation engages with Aleksandra Bida’s concept of a multi-scalar home as a way of understanding the migrant’s identity and place(s) in the world. In examining the dialectic between the diasporic subject’s home – both the absent and adopted home – this dissertation argues that an out-of-sync diasporic subjectivity is manifested in what I call the “poetics of asynchronicity” that undergird the narratives of Hannah Espia’s film Transit (2013), Clement Baloup’s graphic novel Vietnamese Memories and Lian Gouw’s novel Only a Girl . The literary and cinematic representations of mobility in Southeast Asian–specifically Filipino, Indonesian, and Vietnamese–diasporic narratives, reveal the dual-displacement that characterise the experience of diasporic mobility – a displacement in space and in time. This dual-displacement constitutes the migrant’s out-of-sync subjectivity, which is a result of the inability to reduce the “many temporal worlds,” they live in, “the past of the motherland... a present that is often precarious, and an uncertain future,” simultaneously into one (Köhn 109). In theorising a connection between these seemingly disparate narratives, this dissertation is involved in a decolonization of memory. Through a “poetics of asynchronicity,” readers are compelled to remember and to re-member stories that have been pushed to the footnotes of history.