This essay analyses Filipino–Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s novel Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), winner of the Christina Stead Prize for fiction, in the context of the post-apocalyptic Golden Age we are living in and the much-celebrated dystopian Australian tradition. Bobis’s novel is a futuristic political fable that describes a girl’s magical and nightmarish journey through an indeterminate border in a context of environmental and human apocalypse. It foresees ecological disasters of unprecedented dimensions and warns that the damage done to the planet and the largest part of humanity may end up being irreversible. Moreover, it tackles other truths so far exclusively denounced by realist narratives, namely, the Australian government policy on refugees. Some trauma theories, together with Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and Agamben’s notion of “bare life”, will be used to analysee the ways in which Locust Girl denounces the lethal effects of globalized undeterred capitalism and unitary and exclusive forms of nationalism, which are mainly responsible for the enforcement of unfair border laws and the inhuman treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers in the so-called “civilized” world, and in particular in Australia as one important member of the Pacific region. On the other hand, this essay also relies on Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “the posthuman” to show that Locust Girl also testifies to the power of women’s agency and transnational relationships in order to offer some hope of rebirth through suffering and love. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Post-apocalypse Literature Australian Refugee Crisis Posthumanism Bare life Necropolitics trauma

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