Page 184 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

LOCAL/GLOBAL NEGOTIATIONS

It is worth noting that Massey’s redefinition of ‘place’ here involves its theoretical
rearticulation precisely as a borderland, that is, a space where the boundaries
between inside and outside are blurred, a space characterized by a multiplicity
of criss-crossing forces rather than by some singular and unique, internally
originated ‘local’ identity. Massey’s attempt to redefine ‘place’ in terms which
does away with the need to draw boundaries around it is an attempt, not just
to deconstruct the binary oppositioning of ‘the local’ and ‘the global’, but to
build the ‘global’ into the very definition of ‘the local’, to allow ‘a sense of place
which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider
world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ (ibid.: 155).
‘Definition’, says Massey, ‘does not have to be through simple counterposition
to the outside; it can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage
to that “outside” which is therefore itself part of what constitutes the place’
(ibid.). We can see here how Massey shares a preference for mixture and hybridity,
interconnectivity and the destabilization of identities, with the borderland
romantics we encountered earlier. And indeed, there is no doubt that to see
a ‘place’ – whether a neighbourhood, a nation or a whole continent – as an
‘articulated moment in networks of social relations and understandings’ rather than
a bounded area defined through a counter-position to what is outside that area
makes a lot of sense, not only theoretically but also politically. As Massey says,
defining a place through its particular linkages to the ‘outside’ ‘helps get away
from the common association between penetrability and vulnerability’ (ibid.),
and thus would help break down a fundamental mechanism of the production of
xenophobia.
There is a famous characterization of Australia – the ‘place’ I wanted to speak
about here – as a ‘multicultural nation in Asia’, coined by former Prime Minister
Paul Keating. Those familiar with Australian debates will know that this much-
contested phrase represented a discursive strategy, central to Keating’s political
project, to dislocate the old, inward-looking, and defensive manner in which the
white settler state defined itself as a far-flung European outpost in an alien region,
and to relocate it in an integrative relation to and directly within the geographical
region it finds itself in. To be sure, this very geo-cultural reorientation in the
identification of the Australian nation in more ‘cosmopolitan’ terms forms
an important backdrop for my interest in ‘reimagining Asians in multicultural
Australia’. Will the (partial) ‘Asianization’ and multiculturalization of Australian
national identity open up a space for less antagonistic ‘race relations’ between
‘Asians’ and ‘non-Asians’ in Australia? This is a complicated and quite singular
political question the historical and cultural contradictions, ironies and ambiva-
lences of which I have discussed in previous chapters. Suffice it to say here that
the theoretical rearticulation of ‘place’ or ‘the local’ as traversed and produced
by non-local, translocal and global forces – in Stuart Hall’s words, a ‘tricky version
of “the local” which operates within, and has been thoroughly reshaped by “the
global”’ (1993a: 354) – does enable us to theorize local identity not in its binary
oppositioning to some external global monster but as always-already a crossroads,

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