Page 199 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

unfinished and ongoing, contradictory, and eternally unresolved nature of this
double-edged process of simultaneous objectification/subjectification. Seen
this way, the politics of difference, while bitterly necessary now that ‘other’ voices
are becoming increasingly insistent, has not resulted in a new feminist consensus
and never will. There will always be a tension between difference as benign diversity
and difference as conflict, disruption, dissension.

Australian whiteness, the postcolonial
and the multicultural
I have used the terms ‘white’ and ‘Western’ rather indiscriminately so far. This is
problematic, especially given the rapidity with which these terms have become
‘boo-words’ in certain circles, signifying irredeemable political incorrectness. To
counter such sloganeering and to clarify my argument, I should stress that I have
used these concepts first of all as generalizing categories which describe a position
in a structural, hierarchical interrelationship rather than a precise set of cultural
identities. Thus, being white in Australia is not the same as being white in Britain,
France or the United States, as whiteness does not acquire meanings outside of
a distinctive and over-determined network of concrete social relations within which
it is embedded. Even who counts as white is not stable and unchanging. We should
not forget, for example, that in the post-war period there was official doubt about
the whiteness of Southern European immigrants to Australia (Italians, Greeks), as
well as that of the Jews, signifying anxiety among proponents of the White Australia
Policy about the (un)suitability of these groups as new migrants into the country!
(Stratton 2000, Chapter 7). Whiteness, then, is not a biological category but
a political one: to be ‘white’ signifies a position of power and respectability, of
belonging and entitlement, but who is admitted to this position of global privilege
is historically variable. Some peoples have become white over time as their status
and power have risen (such as the Irish and the Jews in the USA) (Ignatiev 1996;
Brodkin 1999), while others have been known for their desire to be white or at least
be treated as white (such as the Japanese in the early twentieth century, when they
managed to be recognized by the European powers as ‘honorary whites’) (Tanaka
1993; Brawley 1995). These historical complexities suggest that we need to go
beyond the generalizations of generic whiteness and undifferentiated Westernness
if we are to understand the specific cultural dynamics in which these interrelation-
ships are played out in any particular context. In other words, analysing and
interrogating the culturally specific ways in which whiteness, including white
femininity, has been historically constructed and inflected is a necessary condition
if feminism is to effectively deuniversalize the experience of white women in feminist
theory and practice. 8
Australia is implicated in the global configuration of white/Western hegemony
in ways which are particular to its history – of European settlement and Aboriginal
genocide, of the White Australia policy, official multiculturalism, and the current
‘push toward Asia’. Despite this, Australia remains predominantly populated by

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