Page 182 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

LOCAL/GLOBAL NEGOTIATIONS

I cannot elaborate on here, rather less talked about in transnational cultural studies. 7
First of all, I would need to problematize the category itself and take into account
that the term ‘Asian’ has different referents in different contexts, depending on
very particular historical, geographical and demographic factors. Thus in Britain
‘Asians’ are most routinely and unthinkingly associated with people from what is
known as ‘South Asia’, comprising the modern nation–states of India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh, reflecting, of course, Britain’s long-standing post-imperial
entanglement with its former ‘Jewel in the Crown’, colonial India. In Australia,
by contrast, the generic ‘Asian’ in popular consciousness would traditionally
be Chinese, going back to the nineteenth-century history of Chinese migration
to the then British settler colony as goldmines were opened up in Victoria and
8
Western Australia. In today’s Australia, however, ‘Asian’ has become the signifier
for a much more pluralized signified, but still mostly associated with people
from East and South-East Asia and much less with South Asians, as is the case in
Britain.
The anomaly becomes apparent, for example, when I read David Parker’s book
Through Different Eyes (1995), a pioneering ethnographic analysis of the cultural
identities of young Chinese people in Britain. In Parker’s terminology, ‘Chinese’
are decidedly separated out from the two key categories for racialized and ethnicized
people in the British context, ‘blacks’ and ‘Asians’, and his study is therefore a
valuable contribution to rescue the marginalized Chinese presence in Britain from
its previously complete invisibility in British cultural studies. In the Australian
context, such a political intervention would be misdirected because in the Australian
discursive configuration, not only are the ‘Chinese’ – itself, as discussed in Part I
of this book, an uncertain, shifting category with multiple meanings – the most
prominent ‘Asians’, it is also the case that the category ‘Asian’ has historically
operated as one of the two key markers for processes of racialization in Australia,
the other being, of course, the category of ‘Aboriginal’. To explain to you why and
how this is the case would take me into a long exposition on the political history
of Australian national identity construction, on the ideological and strategic specifics
of the infamous White Australia Policy which was only abolished in the early 1970s,
and how all this affected the complex social and cultural positioning of ‘Asians’
in Australia, past and present. Furthermore, it would also be essential to discuss
the particular meaning of ‘multiculturalism’, as this now very fashionable term
has very specific inflections in the Australian context, where talk about Australia
as a multicultural nation is official discourse launched by the state, in a way very
different from the much more internationally renowned US furore over multi-
culturalism as a form of oppositional politics mostly limited to the field of higher
education and more directly related to ‘identity politics’. In other words, I would
have to clarify how in Australia multiculturalism is part of an expansive yet not
uncontested dominant discourse, not that of a radical fringe, as it has been
positioned in the USA. Only then, after having discussed all these over-determining
contextualizations, could I begin to get across to you with any necessary subtlety
what the intricate and multifaceted intellectual and political import of re-imagining

171