In the spirit of reconciliation: migrating spirits and Australian postcolonial multiculturalism in Hoa Pham's Vixen

In the spirit of reconciliation: migrating spirits and Australian postcolonial multiculturalism in Hoa Pham's Vixen

There are three key encounters of concern in this chapter that can be roughly categorised as the colonial encounter, the multicultural encounter and the postcolonial encounter. The colonial encounter occurs between the Vietnamese fox fairy and the French vampire. As a critique on the effects of French colonisation on Vietnam, the colonial encounter suggests that colonial powers can be parasitic and so weaken the political and cultural climate of a nation. In the multicultural encounter between the Vietnamese and Chinese fox fairies, Hoa Pham [in Pham's novel, Vixen] explores the possibility of intercultural dialogue within the multicultural state, emphasising the importance of migrant pasts in creating and enriching understandings of Australia as multicultural. Finally, the postcolonial encounters that occur between the fox fairies and the ningaui are used to imagine the political and cultural possibilities of conversations between multicultural and indigenous subjects in postcolonial and multicultural Australia. The shared experience of colonialism by the Vietnamese fox fairy and the ningaui in particular opens up an even more interesting transnational dialogue that, I argue, gestures towards a form of what Anthony Appiah calls 'rooted cosmopolitanism'. These various mythical creatures are utilised by Pham as a means of exploring historical experiences and imagining the possibilities of new intercultural interactions and negotiations.

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