This article examines how contemporary Asian Australian writers reconfigure memoir through autotheory, developing what I term an “out-of-focus” life writing that resists demands for coherence, authenticity and national legibility. In Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing, Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice and André Dao’s Anam, theory functions not as an explanatory framework but as a dispersive force that interrupts, complicates and defocuses the autobiographical “I”. Drawing on concepts from photography, montage and phenomenology, these works refuse the stabilising tendencies of confessional narrative, instead foregrounding multilingualism, fragmentation and transnational memory. Their hybrid forms (collage, memoir essay and speculative archive) challenge the institutional appetite for transparent identity narratives, particularly those extracted from minoritised or refugee histories. In each text, opacity becomes an ethical stance—a refusal to translate complexity into consumable clarity and a commitment to relations that exceed the nation. By situating these works within Asian Australian literary debates on transnational imaginaries, the article argues that autotheory enables memoir to become a site of formal and philosophical experimentation. The “out-of-focus” memoir emerges not as evasion but as a mode of attention that honours uncertainty, multiplicity and the limits of knowledge.
Peter Mathews (Mon,) studied this question.