Rosalind McFarlane is a doctoral candidate with Monash University having previously studied at the University of Western Australia. Her critical work engages with ideas of place, contemporary Asian Australian poetry and depictions of water. She also publishes creative work and is currently part of a collaborative project being written with Siobhan Hodge entitled Speaking geographies.

Water, Diaspora and Desire

Belonging in Contemporary Asian Australian Poetry

Contemporary Asian Australian poets have recently begun to attract more attention, particularly with the publication of the anthology, edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey and Michelle Cahill, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. This essay engages with three of these poets: Debbie Lim, Shen and James Stuart, and reads their poems through a diasporic lens. Contrary to scholarship that investigates belonging using the more orthodox ideas of home and land, this reading engages with fluidity and mobility through the depictions of water to better represent the diasporic experience. Further, these poems employ desire and the desiring subject to engage with the way diasporic belonging is figured as contested and contingent. Each of these elements will be explored in the poems in order to investigate the link between diasporic belonging and depictions of water.