Page 201 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

it is always infused by peculiar cultural assumptions and affectations. There was a
notable measure of anxious spite in the insistence with which this white woman
proclaimed Australia as her ‘home’ while emphatically denying me the right to do
the same thing. It shocked me, because I thought this kind of thing was possible
in Europe, not in a settler society such as Australia where everyone, after all, except
from the original inhabitants, comes from somewhere else. In declaring herself,
like Pauline Hanson, to be a native threatened by alien immigrants, she displays
a historical amnesia of (British) colonialism which actively erases the history of
Aboriginal dispossession of the land. In other words, in her claim that Asians don’t
belong in this country, she simultaneously reproduces, in a single appropriative
gesture, the exclusion of Aboriginal people. A disturbing bunker mentality is
expressed in this peculiar double-edgedness of white Australian ethnocentrism,
a mentality of tenaciously holding on to what one has which, I suggest, is sourced
precisely in the precariousness and fragility, the moot legitimacy and lack of
historical density of white settler subjectivity. 9
Australian feminism has to take into account this two-sided antagonism, in which
white Australia constitutes and asserts itself by demarcating itself from the immi-
grant on the one hand and the indigene on the other by racializing and/or
ethnicizing both, naturalizing its own claim to nativeness in the process. It is clear
that an Australian feminist politics of difference needs to dismantle and deconstruct
the hierarchical relations involved in this complex and contradictory, three-pronged
structure of mutual exclusivism, in which ‘white’ is the constitutive centre. This
quotation from anthropologist Margaret Jolly typifies the problematic as it is
currently seen through white feminist eyes:
There is the general problem of white feminists dealing with Australian
women of colour, the rainbow spectrum of ethnic identities resulting from
a long process of migration. But the problem is more acute with indigenous
women because they identify us not so much as Anglo-inhabitants of
Australia, but as the white invaders of their land. There is a strong and
persistent sense of racial difference and conflict born out of the history
of colonialism in our region.
(1991: 56; emphasis added)

My quarrel with this comment is that it reinstates the white feminist subject as
the main actor, for whom the Aboriginal other and the migrant other are two
competing interlocutors, kept utterly separate from each other. One result of
this is that the differing relations between indigenous peoples and various groups
of settlers remain unaddressed, and that the Anglo centre – its problems and
concerns pertaining to identity and difference – remains the main focus of attention.
In intellectual terms, this amounts to a non-dialogue between the postcolonial and
the multicultural problematic, the serial juxtapositioning of the two conditional
entirely upon the distributive power of the hegemonic Anglo centre. From a white
(Anglo) perspective, it may be understandable that priority be given to Anglo-

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