Banana Bending is the first book to offer a comparative study of diasporic Asian literatures in Australia and Canada, arguing that while contingent coalitions between diasporic groups serve various politicizing and promotional purposes, artistic and cultural struggles manifest themselves within localized spaces.

Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian writers exist within the realities of specific national contexts that are not necessarily bypassed by configurations of the diasporic community. Tseen-Ling Khoo shows that Asian-Canadian and Asian-Australian literatures are developing in dissimilar ways because of demographic and geographical differences, the degree of governmental intervention through cultural policy initiatives, and the levels of encouragement or financial support for racial minority authors and their work. Khoo exposes the particularities of literary development within specific historical bases through comparative critiques of Asian-Canadian and Asian-Australian texts and argues that the questions of whether authors of Asian descent writing in the western world are adding to national canons or creating subversive (but marginalized) streams will remain as long as binary demarcations prevail. Khoo contends that literary criticism should see racial minority literatures as existing in both categories at once, thus shifting the boundaries of what constitutes a national canon as well as posing challenges to the literary status quo.