Page 164 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

IDENTITY BLUES

that the world being remade by these forces is a deeply unjust and inequitable one,
dominated by the economic might of transnational corporations, the elusive power
of mobile finance capital and the ruthless logic of the market. Resistance, in this
light, is completely legitimate and politically necessary. However, as this resistance
is framed increasingly frequently through a downright oppositional stance against
‘globalization’ per se, as if it were the cause for almost all the world’s economic,
social, political, cultural and ecological problems, identities are being (re)asserted
which achieve imaginary closure through an absolutization of a strictly localized,
exclusionary ‘us’, and the symbolic warding off of everything and everyone that is
associated with the invading ‘outside’. The resurgence of ethnic nationalisms and
absolutisms in many parts of the world is one of the most frequently cited examples
of the increasing appeal of such fortress identities. It seems clear, however, that such
embattled identities, in their quest for certainty, refuge and protection, can only
represent a defensive resistance against the global disorder so relentlessly produced
by the volatile forces of capitalist postmodernity. They are driven not by a positive
hope for the future, or by a project to actively shape that future, but by what
Meaghan Morris (1998b) calls ‘future fear’: a sense that things can only get worse.
Ironically, perhaps it is precisely the presumed truth that the battle against the
monster of ‘globalization’ is a virtually hopeless one that explains both the intensity
and the tenacity of the defensive identities forged against it.
Here in Australia, the turbulences and uncertainties arising from the govern-
ment’s sustained and relentless pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies in the past
two decades, arguably to restructure the nation so that it can take advantage with
more gusto from the promise of wealth delivered by a rapidly globalizing economy,
have been all too palpable in recent years. Importantly, this process of restructuring
is not only an economic project but also a cultural one, designed to rework and
redefine the nation’s representation of itself, its national identity – all with the
ultimate economic motive of improving the national marketing image, as Morris
(1998b: 217) puts it, to ‘make Australia “look better” to its trading partners’.
Thus, as I have discussed in previous chapters, it was only a few years ago, in the
first half of the 1990s, that Australian official culture could present this nation
proudly, and rather superciliously, as a progressive, world-class ‘multicultural
nation’ which has successfully discarded and left behind its shameful racist past,
embodied by the infamous White Australia Policy. Under the flamboyant leadership
of former Prime Minister Paul Keating (1992–96), Australians were interpellated
to see themselves as an outward-looking, cosmopolitan and worldly nation, fully
integrated and thriving in the global village and the new world order. But the
failure of this globalist nationalist desire was rudely illuminated in the years after
1996, when it became clear that neither multiculturalism nor cosmopolitanism
were universally embraced by the population at large.
Under the leadership of Pauline Hanson, who draws her charisma from an
aggressively lower middle-class, anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan populist
nationalism, a vigorous grassroots political movement emerged of disenchanted,
mostly white, rural and working-class people who revolted against what they saw

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