On Disease Images In Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

Brian Castro（1950-）is a Chinese-Australian writer who can rival Patrick White,the Nobel laureate in the Australian literary world.Castro has published a total of 12novels,writing about cultural identity,racialism,war trauma and disease images,including Birds of Passage published in 1983,Shanghai Dancing in 2003.He has won more than 10 different awards in literature.For example,Shanghai Dancing won the Victorian Premier’s Awards for Fiction and NSW Premier’s Awards for Fiction.Shanghai Dancing revolves around the protagonist Antonio Castro,focusing on his return from Australia to China to find the Castro family history.The novel deeply depicts human beings,diseases,war and ecological conditions in the 20^thcentury.Therefore,based on the frequent disease images in the novel and Jane Bennett’s vital materialist theory of democracy,this thesis will study the close relationship between human and nonhuman actants,diseases and the ecological environment,as well as the hidden racial discrimination,patriarchal system and war trauma in the political ecological society.The thesis is divided into three parts.The first part primarily presents Brian Castro’s life experience and literary achievements,a brief introduction of the research status at home and abroad on Shanghai Dancing,as well as the feasibility of Jane Bennett’s vital materialist theory of democracy to interpret the novel.The second part is the main part of the thesis,consisting of three chapters.Based on different kinds of diseases images presented in the novel,this part studies them in the political ecological society,as well as the multiple factors that cause the disease to be uncontrollable.The first chapter focuses on personal diseases that cannot be transmitted in society,such as opium addiction and diseases caused by injuries in war.Such diseases involve the participation of human beings and non-human beings.The second chapter studies the contagious diseases,including cholera,leprosy,pestis,and beriberi,which can be divided into the contagious diseases spread in the public place where common people live and diseases spread in the camp where the prisoners live and work after the war.It discusses the relationship between the ecological environment,infectious diseases and the people.The third chapter discusses the psychological diseases that emerge after the war,such as aphasia,depression,which are associated with war trauma,racial discrimination,and patriarchal system.The third part is the conclusion which mainly summarizes the key points of the whole thesis and renders an innovative interpretation of Shanghai Dancing in light of Bennett’s vital materialist theory of democracy.Since the outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019,the international political ecology has faced enormous challenges,and the outbreak of the epidemic has affected the political ecology of many countries.Therefore,a study of the disease images and the political ecology presented in Castro’s novel is positive for the current tense national political ecology and significant for the correction of blind and narrow racist thoughts and for the compensation of the ecological damage caused by war.