Resumen: This Master Thesis analyzes Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) as a postcolonial text that creates a privileged space where the voices of the subaltern can be heard. Bobis manages to subvert the US War on Terror, official discourses, and global hegemonic discourse under the façade of the exotic otherness that is often associated with Christmas. This thesis relies on some of the most relevant assumptions put forward by well-known ethical and postcolonial critics in order to show that Bobis’s novel succeeds in illustrating how nomadic identities that create multiple forms of belonging allow for the encounter with the “other.” A close examination of the novel reveals that it favours the cross-cultural encounter between characters that belong to different worlds, in particular that between two vulnerable women in a liminal space. The outcome of these encounters will be the transformation of the character that allegedly belongs in the dominant culture, to the point that the artificial boundary self/other eventually fades out. This work also analyzes the fundamental role played by subversive non-verbal communication in the novel. Noland’s bodily language allows for the articulation of love and care, while his notebook contains a subaltern text that encodes a story of bonds that make a home.