Page 136 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

collective memory, or a sense of racial kinship, a sense of ‘Australian family’. What
is at stake, then, is a reconfiguration of Australian nationalism, from its earlier,
racially exclusionary form – the nation as ‘one’ – to a new, inclusive, and open-ended
form – the nation as a porous container of multiple, criss-crossing, intersecting
flows of different peoples and cultures (Turner 1997). This is not by any means an
easy task: it involves a whole new style of imagining the nation, for which there are
no proven established models. Meaghan Morris has put the hard questions this way:

The old nationalism was a protectionist as well as a racist settlement that
thrived on Australia’s cultural and physical isolation. What sort of unity
can be projected for a free-trading nation at the mercy of world economic
forces that no government can control? For a society unable effectively to
legitimize its norms with reference to a common culture, yet with large
numbers of citizens yearning to do so?
(1998b: 209)

To be sure, Australia is not the only country faced with this predicament –
a predicament intimately bound up with the accelerating process of globalization,
which has unsettled the real and imaginary stability and immanence of all
nation–states. The increasingly frequent reference to ‘multiculturalism’ and
‘cultural diversity’ is symptomatic of the quest for a new national culture suitable
for globalizing times. In this, the task is to develop viable ways of ‘living together’
in which differences cannot be erased, only negotiated, and where notions of
belonging no longer depend on an allegiance to a given ‘common culture’ (under-
girded by racial sameness) but on the process of partial sharing of the country, a
process that will necessarily imply give and take, mutual influencing, and ongoing
cultural hybridization. As long as acceptance of such processual and open-ended
nation-building is not forthcoming, ‘Asians in Australia’ will remain a contradiction
in terms.

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