Blending and Distorting Genre: Comparing Diasporic Texts of Five Diasporic Writers in the Antipodes

A comparative study of literary texts by Greek Australian writers who borrow Greek oral traditional tropes and symbols can illuminate the heterogeneous nature of the diasporic identity. When writers borrow and use traditional symbols and motifs it may appear to signify Hellenistic continuity, or alternatively (if used in an untraditional way) it can challenge the idea of an imagined "Greek" homogeneous, cultural identity. The transgressive texts Dead Europe and The Mule's Foal by Greek Australian writers Christos Tsiolkas and Fotini Epanomitis merge a paramythic voice with the apocalyptic tale, the anti-Bildungsroman, the travelogue, dirty or grunge realism, burlesque and satire. Epanomitis exploits ethnography and renders it strange even as she dares to articulate the unsaid of civil society by using playful satire. Her parody of oral women's tales subverts the male dominance of Greek rural society. Tsiolkas merges violent urban realist themes together with an epic ghost tale to expose the dark side of Europe's and Greece's recent history. When we contrast these texts with Antigone Kefala's Alexia: A Tale for Advanced Children and various poems by Styllianos Charkianakis and Dean Kalimnios then various questions arise; the first has to do with the problem of genre categorisation when antithetical types are merged, and the second has to do with identity when the diasporic subject occupies an ambivalent space in which there is a constant negotiation of contradictory cultural beliefs and ideologies. Are these diverse texts emblematic of Greek Australian postcolonial transformations that link the global and the local while challenging readers to recognize that ethnicity, in a postmodern world, is as Ien Ang states, "a provisional and partial "identity" which must be constantly (re) invented and (re) negotiated" (Ang 2001: 29, 1992-93).