ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on war and related violent conflicts, that is, collective violence committed by larger groups or states to advance particular social, political and economic agendas. It argues that the transnational turn in novels such as Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman broadens and transnationalises the parameters of the Australian literary canon: the novel’s deployment of radical empathy and collaborative cross-cultural grief makes Filipina and Filipina-Australian subjects grievable as subjects in the Australian national imaginary. Bobis’s novel, Fish-Hair Woman, which won the Philippine National Book Award in 2014, is a difficult, complex and confronting book that depicts the catastrophic effects of state-sponsored and guerrilla terror in the Philippines and the gendered counter imaginaries that arise in response to it. Paula Abood's ‘Stories from the Diaspora’ points to the multiple literary legacies and the multidirectional and transnational forms of memory that inform the literature of Arab-Australian women writers.
