Liminal Waterscape, Smellscape And Bodyscape In Brian Castro's Transnational Writing

Among Chinese Australian writers,Brian Castro is the most widely recognized writer and his writing has long foregrounded cross-culturality and transnationalism with his presentation of new forms of narrative,which enables readers to quest anew racial,national and cultural identity.Birds of Passage and After China are Castro's two earliest novels,both of which describe Chinese migrants' lives in Australia and address the issue of identity crisis.These two works already reflect Castro's important thinking on transnational identity.In response to the increasing transnational movements,the process of the formation and evolvement of the transnational identity has become a heated topic in transnational literary studies.The theory of liminality in anthropology concerning the in-between state during the identity transition is used as an analytical framework in this thesis to explore the relationship between space,displacement and identity in Castro's two transnational works.Considering the psychological and emotional changes of transnational individuals caused by environmental and spatial changes,as well as their impact on identity transition,this thesis combines relevant concepts from other disciplines and adopts the methodology of combining theory with a close reading of the texts to study three specific ‘scapes',namely waterscapes,smellscapes and bodyscapes,to explore why these spatial-temporal ‘scapes' can be regarded as liminalities,and how they exert their liminal functions in the characters' identity transition brought by their transnational movements.It discovers that the waterscapes are highly liminal as they can liberate the liminal entities from the secular structure and encourage them to introspect.Therefore,they can recognize the hybridity and volatility of their identity.The smellscapes,with their transgressive power to dismantle the rigid boundary between race and class as well as between fantasy and reality,are liminal as they help develop intimacy and inspire creativity.At last the liminality of the bodyscapes lies in the fact that a series of attributes such as silence,sexlessness,anonymity and mixed desires highlight the homogeneity and absence of hierarchy among bodies,which aims to call attention to the sensory body,as well as to the shared emotion and humanity of mankind.Most of the characteristics discussed above are in line with the key attributes of the liminal period in the rites of passage according to liminality theory.All in all,this thesis argues that the central thread linking these three ‘scapes' isliminality which creates a zone of homogeneity,equality and creativity to offer the potential for building a transnational identity.