“…’sensations of rootedness,’ imagined through associations with blood and soil, may be expressed as maintaining equilibrium. This paper contributes to understandings of ‘plurality’ in colonial Burma and ‘Anglo-Burmese’ experiences and identities.”

“In November 2017, I travelled Business Class from Guangzhou, China, to Yangon, Myanmar. I was trying to catch the end of a conference — which, incidentally, meant flying into Yangon on the same day Pope Francis was flying out. There must have been some embargo on seats that lifted at just the right time, because my travel agent found a seat available in Business Class that was also in my budget. It was, in fact, the same price as economy.”

“I have an accent, and when Australians first meet me, they often want to know if I am American or Canadian. Then, because of my looks, they want to know whether I am part Asian. And then they want to know how long I’ve lived here, in Australia.”

“I knew it was wrong as I left the store, the box sitting flat and heavy in my black and white plastic bag. But there’s a weakness I have for paying less than full cost. If I haven’t really earned a thing, it becomes that bit more precious.”

My grandparents had stayed behind. I never met them. In fact none of my family has ever been allowed back. I was the first one to return. So why did I go? I was quite reluctant to go for a really long time, but really I was so keen to know about the place where I had been born. And what I found was society in total transition.

Narrating one’s own experience is a significant act of empowerment for a person with multicultural backgrounds. However such narrative is often listened to as a story of ‘ethnic minorities’, not as that of fellow citizens co-dwelling in society. Featuring three acclaimed creative writers, this seminar discusses the ways in which migrant or diasporic stories are addressed as a member of society and received without being reduced to ‘their’ stories.

Throughout the city’s flourishing galleries, artists were asking what it meant to live in Myanmar, how the past continued to shape the present and what the future might hold.

Anglo-Burmese skin always intimates. It alludes to sexual transgression and to the other. It stretches the idea of skin and what may or may not be contained within it. It connects to and stands in for other skins (where skin delineates the limit of or is a metaphor for a subject). Through this continuous allusion, this contingency, it complicates rather than clarifies difference.

In my writing I represent the Anglo-Burmese in colonial Burma and thus, I begin this paper with a question: how does a writer represent mixed-race subjectivity within the English-language literary tradition in a way that is ethically and artistically satisfying?