Page 167 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

was not unlike Stuart Hall’s (1993b) exhilarated realization, as a West Indian
migrant in England, to find himself ‘centred at last’ in the postmodern culture of
multiracial London in the late twentieth century, precisely when many (white)
British themselves, in Hall’s observation, had started to ‘feel just marginally
“marginal”’.
On the other side of the world, I could similarly indulge in the feeling of being
on the right side of history, as it were, on the side of the future not the past, of
change rather than stasis, of becoming rather than being. I never thought I could
ever experience my migrant identity as an asset rather than a liability, but this was
made possible in the cultural ideological configuration of 1990s’ Australia – a
configuration which, in global terms, is part of ‘that immense process of historical
relativization’ which has seen the ‘Rest’ creeping into the ‘West’ (Hall 1993b:
138). My euphoria was reassuringly validated by the assertion in much recent
cultural and postcolonial theorizing, from Iain Chambers to Salman Rushdie, from
Trinh Minh-ha to Julia Kristeva, from John Berger to Paul Carter, that ‘the migrant’
embodies par excellence the values and practices of cosmopolitanism, worldliness
and multiple identifications that the new, multicultural and globalizing Australia
was supposed to have embraced. This imagined Australia was a postmodern and
postcolonial, transnational Australia in which my own subject position would be,
well, perhaps not quite socially centred, but certainly symbolically central – central
to some desired imaginary future of Australia as ‘part of Asia’, not separate and aloof
from it.
Of course, my self-interested euphoria, always easily disrupted and marred
by distrust anyway, turned out to be premature and short-lived, as the eruption of
Pauline Hanson’s movement made it all too painfully clear. People like Hanson had
obviously started to feel more than just marginally marginal, and resisted virulently
that felt marginalization. Worse, she has pointed the finger in the direction of those
who, from her point of view, are the progenitors of her marginalization and
decentralization: all those who are the representatives and promoters of the forces
of ‘globalization’. As Peter Cochrane (1996: 9) has noted, ‘Hanson represents the
grief that goes with the loss of cultural centrality and the loss of identity that happens
when a cosmopolished (Anglo) elite lines up with the new ethnic forces on the
block.’ This means, logically and emotionally, that I represent all that Hanson is
fighting against! Yet it is far too facile, in this context, to play the anti-racism card.
As Meaghan Morris remarks:
When the overwhelming majority of poor, economically ‘redundant’, and
culturally ‘uncompetitive’ people in a nation are white, [Pauline Hanson’s
voice] is very easily redeemed as that of the oppressed – white victims of
history silenced by the new, cosmopolitan, multicultural elites.
(1998b: 221)
Against this background, how should the well-educated, Asian migrant and critical
intellectual, a card-carrying member of the ‘new, cosmopolitan, multicultural elites’,
respond?

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