Page 150 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

THE CURSE OF THE SMILE

Thus, the ‘celebration’ of cultural diversity has become one of the ideological
catch cries of societies which recognize themselves as ‘multicultural’ today. The very
assertion that ‘cultural diversity’ – whatever this means – is a cause for celebration,
rather than something to be rejected or feared, is worth a pause. The discourse
of celebration, evoked again and again at official commemorations of the nation
(see e.g. Spillman 1997), has the effect of repressing the expression of some of
the darker, more conflictual, less harmonious reverberations of living together in
a culturally diverse society (of which Pauline Hanson herself is a dramatic manifesta-
tion). So often do we hear official spokespersons make the claim that Australia as
a nation has discarded its shameful racist past and embraced the values of cultural
pluralism and tolerance that we are compelled to wonder what is at stake in the
repetitive and insistent, ritualistic enunciation of such a rosy and ‘politically correct’
image.
The forces of desire propelling this utopian social imaginary have power effects
of their own. Australia’s desire to be (seen as) a tolerant, multicultural nation
in which cultural diversity is celebrated tends to vindicate a redemptive national
narrative designed to come to terms with its explicitly racist history of Aboriginal
annihilation and of the White Australia policy, which barred non-white peoples,
particularly ‘Asians’, from entering the country. That is, an influential narrative
of progressive transformation circulates in Australia today in which the nation
is claimed to be on the road from a racist, exclusionary past to a multicultural,
inclusionary present, with an emphatic pride of place for the nation’s indigenous
people (Stratton and Ang 1998). 1 am not concerned here with the sociological
validity of this narrative. Rather, I am interested in how the truth value accorded
to this narrative has the unfortunate effect of suppressing a plain dealing and
unsentimental consideration of the continuing constitutive role of processes of
racialized and ethnicized othering in contemporary Australia. I want to suggest
in this chapter that these processes of othering have been transformed in the
multicultural era: racially and ethnically marked people are no longer othered today
through simple mechanisms of rejection and exclusion, but through an ambivalent
and apparently contradictory process of inclusion by virtue of othering.
Featured in a mid-1990s’ government poster encouraging immigrant residents
of the country to take up Australian citizenship, which arguably would seal their
permanent and definitive inclusion within the imagined community of nation, is the
image of a visibly Asian woman, that is, a female with East Asian features. The poster
says: ‘Come and join our family.’ Such is the nation–state’s determination to be
perceived as pursuing an inclusive policy towards its subjects irrespective of race,
ethnicity or gender, that an Asian woman can now stand for the Australian
population as a whole, a full member of the Australian ‘family’. But we may ask, why
an Asian, and why a woman rather than a man? And does her selection as a symbolic
representative of the Australian citizenry really mean that she is no longer margin-
alized in Australia’s national space and no longer occupies the position of ‘other’?
Indeed, in light of the fact that only thirty years ago Asians were still considered
persona non grata in this country, there is a certain irony to the fact that, in a

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