East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination.

• Author: Yang, Jian
• Position: Book review

EAST BY SOUTH: China in the Australasian Imagination

Editors: Charles Ferrall, Paul Millar and Keren Smith

Published by: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2005, 439pp, $39.95.

East by South attempts to answer the question 'How do antipodeans imagine/represent/construct the Chinese?' With 20 chapters by different contributors, the book mainly surveys New Zealand and Australian literature. As the editors reveal, it was their observation that there were an 'extraordinary number of Australasian texts featuring Chinese characters' that sparked their idea for the book. The other component is the history of chinoiseries and its exotic appeal in the West. Although the book focuses on China, the editors intend to 'write the story of ... Australasian attitudes to race and culture in general'.

The book begins with Charles Ferrall's introductory chapter, which provides a rather comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of the evolution of Australasian Orientalism. Ferrall believes that 'the history of Australasian Orientalism needs to be continually re-written'. The reader will find the chapter most helpful in reading other chapters, especially those in Part A entitled 'Australasian Sinophobia and Sinophilia'.

Section One of Part A is an examination of 'socio-political perspectives' of Australasian sinophobia and sinophilia. It starts with Mark Williams's delicate analysis of 'sentimental racism', which extended sympathy to Maori and Aborigines as 'dying races' but not to the Chinese. Tony Ballantyne, on the other hand, notes the 'writing out' of Asia and Asians within the bicultural paradigm of New Zealand history. Ballantyne thus suggests debates over the relationship between historical narratives and biculturalism. Across the Tasman, the anxieties over Chinese invasion or yellow peril were common in Australian literature of the 19th and early 20th century. This is vividly exposed in Noel Rowe's discussion of Australian verse in the early 20th century and Timothy Kendall's examination of Australia's invasion anxiety in the Cold War years.

The second section, with a somewhat elusive tide 'Aesthetic Perspectives', continues to investigate sinophobia and sinophilia, particularly the latter. While Paul Millar raises questions over the suggestion that there is some form of evolutionary progress in New Zealand literary depictions of scape-goated minorities, Duncan Campbell looks into sinophilia as opposed to sinophobia in New Zealand with a hint of...