Page 200 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .

Anglo-Celtic people (making up about 75 per cent of the population according to
the 1996 Census), who inhabit ex-nominated whiteness in this country. Its main
social institutions and basic cultural orientations are identifiably Western with solid
British moorings, and as a nation it is categorized in the international order as a
part of ‘the West’. Yet it is important to note that Australian whiteness is itself
relatively marginal in relation to world-hegemonic whiteness. The fact that Australia
itself is on the periphery of the Euro-American core of ‘the West’ (and as such is
often forgotten or ignored by that core), produces a sense of non-metropolitan,
postcolonial whiteness whose structures of feeling remain to be explored. Meaghan
Morris (1992) has begun to capture the distinctive ambiguities of Australian
whiteness with the term ‘white settler subjectivity’, a subject position which, Morris
notes, oscillates uneasily between identities as colonizer and colonized. This tallies
empirically with what Susanne Schech and Jane Haggis (2000) have found in their
interviews with young Anglo-Australians, from which they teased out a persistent
incoherence of white Australians’ sense of self in the late twentieth century: on
the one hand, many of them passionately wanted to see Australia as a multicultural
society in which everyone ‘could be themselves’, but on the other hand they kept
stressing anxiously that ‘we should be one country’. In this light, Australian
whiteness proves to be steeped in a deep sense of the ambivalence, ambiguity and
multiplicity so valued by Flax. Here again, however, it doesn’t get us very far
to celebrate these conditions as inherently positive principles. Rather, they signal
a historically specific cultural predicament which has led Morris (1992: 471) to
describe the Australian social formation as both ‘dubiously postcolonial’ and
‘prematurely postmodern’. I want to suggest that the precariousness and fragility
of this antipodean whiteness, so different from (post-)imperial British whiteness or
messianic, superpower American whiteness, inscribe and affect the way in which
white Australia relates to its non-white ‘others’. I will finish this chapter then, by
sketching briefly how Australian feminism is implicated in this.
Being Asian in Australia necessarily implies a problematic subject positioning.
Earlier in this book I have described at length how the White Australia policy
effectively excluded Asian peoples from settling in the country, because Australia
wanted to be a ‘white nation’, a far-flung outpost of Europe, the West. Since the
abandonment of this policy, however, ‘we’ Asians are allowed in. And the rhetoric
of multiculturalism even encourages us to contribute to the cultural diversity of
Australia. Still, the presence of Asians is not naturalized. A while ago I bumped into
a middle-aged white woman in the supermarket. Such small accidents happen all
the time; they are part of the everyday experience of sharing a space, including
national space. But she was annoyed and started calling me names. ‘Why don’t you
go back to your own country!’ she shouted. I am familiar with this exhortation: it
is a declaration of exclusion racialized and ethnicized people have to put up with
all the time. But what does such a comment mean in Australia? I want to suggest
that, placed in the larger context of Australian cultural history, in the context of
the racial/spatial anxiety I discussed in Chapter 7, the racism expressed here is not
just ordinary prejudice. Indeed, prejudice is never ordinary, never culturally neutral:

189