2022 IB Diploma Extended Essays

3

Research Question How do Brian Caswell’s Only the Heart and Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty present the consequences of Asian-Australian immigration on identity?

Introduction This essay will explore the portrayal of Asian-Australian identities in literature, focussing on the sense of self consequences of cultural hybridisation. Amnesty and Only the Heart were chosen as they each portray refuge-seeking immigrants to Australia, despite having differing genres and settings. Only the Heart is a young adult fiction text set between 1970 and 1990, while the murder mystery Amnesty takes place in modern day Sydney. However, both texts tell the tale of immigration to Australia, and, by extension, provide an account of the consequences of a hybrid cultural identity. Amnesty , a recent novel by best-selling author Aravind Adiga, was shortlisted for the Australian Miles Franklin Award, chosen for representing “Australian life” (Miles Franklin Literary Award, n.d.). The novel focuses on Dhananjay ‘Danny’ Rajaratnam, who struggles in his day-to-day life as an ‘illegal’ immigrant. The novel recounts how he becomes inexplicably intertwined in a murder case and records his day as he grapples with whether to risk deportation by going to the police with vital information regarding the event. Brian Caswell’s Only The Heart recalls a story inspired by actor David An Phu Chiem, reconstructing a Vietnamese family’s journey as “boat people”. It alternates between interview style recollections from Toan and Linh, teenagers who sought refuge from Vietnam in Australia with their families as young children, and present-tense stories of their family members set during the journey. Despite the evident superficial differences between the texts, the similar immigrational focus of each complement each other in a discussion of hybrid cultural identities. As Kràl postulates in her discussion of diasporic representations in Anglophone literature, “migrations have forced theorists to make room for new categories and increasingly pay