Page 168 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

IDENTITY BLUES

What I have evoked in this chapter is a confrontation of the past and the future,
a tussle between ‘identity’ as essential being, locked in (an image of) the past, and
‘identity’ as open-ended becoming, invested in a future that remains to be struggled
over. But it is clear that the confrontation has to be negotiated, worked over: the
very prominence and appeal of reactionary identity politics among those who feel
left out and disempowered as we are about to enter the twenty-first century betoken
that we cannot simply dismiss their fears, anxieties and grievances. We cannot
discard them simply as irrational, senseless or illegitimate. To put it differently,
what is called for now is active negotiation within the present, a present in
which, for better and worse, conflicting cultural identities share the same (national)
space and cannot but relate to one another: as long as democracy prevails, these
differences will have to be sorted out in some way, whether we like it or not. In
this respect, the very relegation of the Hanson phenomenon to ‘the past’ by the
self-declared guardians of ‘the future’ is part of the problem rather than the solution,
unless we declare that those often denigrated as ‘white trash’ have no place in the
1
present world and simply write them off for the future. I, for one, do not believe
such a politics of exclusion is an option.
Meaghan Morris asks the hard, awkward questions this way:

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: 208)
For Morris, these are political questions that require pragmatic answers, not
principled ones: the national, in this light, is not to be defined primarily in terms
of ‘identity’ at all, but as a problematic process, not in terms of the formulation of
a positive ‘common culture’ or ‘cohesive community’ but as the unending, day-
to-day hard work of managing and negotiating differences, the practical working
out of shared procedures and codes for co-existence, conciliation and mutual
recognition.
As an Asian migrant and arguably as a member of the cosmopolitan, multicultural
elites, I have nothing in common with the white, underprivileged, xenophobic
Hanson supporter living in rural or suburban Australia. Yet as we share the territorial
and symbolic space of the nation, there is an involuntary relationship between
us which I cannot simply extract myself from. In this situation it is the struggle
over the ways in which this relationship is made to mean which matters: it can
mean either an absolute antagonism, as has been the dominant tendency on both
sides, e.g. global versus local, privileged versus marginalized, progressive versus
reactionary, or it can be conceived in more negotiated, conciliatory, exploratory
terms, terms in which no singular antagonism is allowed to saturate the entire
significance of the relationship. How this relationship is made to mean is not
predetermined, but is open to active intervention at diverse levels of political

157