In this “fictional memoir” Davina Quinlivan explores the effects of colonialism, classism and bureaucracy on individual identity, and the many hypocrisies embedded within the world of contemporary academia.
As a fellow second-generation immigrant, and someone who grew up below the poverty line but also went on to work in a prestigious university, the experiences Quinlivan outlines here are personally familiar. The structural problems of the modern neoliberal university are very real, and a first-hand account from an “outsider” who has found herself working within the system is long overdue.
Why then dilute the account by making half of it up? Quinlivan describes her book as “a work of memoir and imagination”, explaining that “some conversations have been re-created from memory and others are entirely imagined”. Why fictionalise when the truth alone is so necessary?
Such a caveat makes it hard to take the book, and the issues raised within, seriously: is her tale of the skinhead neo-Nazi student who aggressively argues that the artist Gustav Klimt should be grateful to the Nazis real? Or her anecdote about the senior male academic who shouted at her during a Zoom meeting? When faced with a litany of injustices but not told which ones are real or not, the reading experience begins to feel like emotional manipulation.
READ MORE
Quinlivan further problematises her text by continually referring to her Burmese heritage as “mystical ancestral power”, reducing her grandparents to fairy-godmother figures with “funny little heads” (yes, really) and mystical wisdom to impart. I’m in favour of acknowledging forms of knowledge that go beyond the rational, but this feels like an act of internalised Orientalism, in which the “eastern” Other becomes exotically mythified under the western gaze. I am sure this is not Quinlivan’s intention, but language matters, and her vague passages of dreamy lyricism only serve to cheapen what should be a serious account of structural prejudices.
Finally, the ultimate transformation the narrator undergoes doesn’t feel all that liberating: Quinlivan finds a sense of self, “freed from fear”, while the same structural problems she expends the text outlining have only got worse. Perhaps this kind of individualist transcendence is all we can hope for this far into late-stage capitalism – but I can’t help but yearn for something better.
