"Hours of Morbid Entertainment": Self-Irony and Replayed Clichés in Hsu-Ming Teo's Fiction'

Abstract

This article examines the representation of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian immigrants in popular Australian fiction. In a close analysis of Hsu-Ming Teo’s first novel Love and Vertigo (2000), it draws attention both to the potential and the problems of self-irony in what have chiefly been read as autobiographically inspired texts. Parodic elements may constructively rupture common readerly expectations of an “Asian past” and hence demand a larger rethinking of prevailing conceptuali-sations of diaspora and diasporic writing. Yet the use of parody has also got its limitations and is symptomatically often edited out in the texts’ reception.