Page 220 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NOTES

3 The project, with co-researcher Jon Stratton, was funded by an Australian Research
Council Large Grant.
4 It is notable that the transnational, if not global popularity of so-called ‘French
theory’ has been predicated on a suppression of its origins in the French context,
just as the global hegemony of Hollywood has been predicated on an ideological
universalization (and therefore decontextualization) of its rootedness in American
sensibilities.
5 I should add here that the relative visibility of Australian cultural studies in the inter-
national cultural studies scene (see e.g. Turner 1993; Frow and Morris 1993) is also
due to the hegemony of English as the global language for theory and scholarship. It
is significant, for example, that journals such as the European Journal for Cultural
Studies and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies have to be published in English, most likely
not the primary language of most of its authors. The politics of the linguistic power
relations this situation gives rise to has hardly been addressed. See Ang (1992).
6 As Australia is an island-continent surrounded by sea, the absence of ‘real’, physical
borders with neighbouring nation–states has been a major influence on the sense of
geographical isolation and cultural insularity on the Australian psyche. One recurrent
border dispute is with Indonesian fishermen, who allegedly regularly illegally enter
Australian territorial waters to the north of the country. Whenever these people get
caught, they are sent back to where they came from and their boats get confiscated.
The constructed ‘unrealness’ of borders in the Australian imagination is also exem-
plified by the relegation of refugee detention centres (where illegal Asian ‘boat people’
are locked behind barbed wire) to the very remote Northwestern far end of the
country, away from the ‘civilized’, modern and densely populated South, especially
the Southeast (where cities such as Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne are located). See
Neilson (1996) and Hage (1998) on ‘ethnic caging’.
7 The dominant contemporary tendency to associate ‘race’ with ‘blackness’ needs to be
interrogated; even the term ‘people of color’, used in the United States to design an
inclusive category for all racialized people, cannot account for modes of racialization
which do not depend on colour signifiers (as in the important case of the Jews). See
Stratton (2000).
8 For historical accounts of the Australian colonial construction of the Chinese as an
unwanted ‘race’ see e.g. Markus (1979), Cronin (1982).

11 I’M A FEMINIST BUT . . .
1 In Australian feminism, this trend was evidenced in important publications such as
Intersexions: Gender/Class/Culture/Ethnicity (Bottomley et al. 1991), Living in the
Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia (Pettman 1992) and Feminism
and the Politics of Difference (Gunew and Yeatman 1993). Significantly, they all
appeared in the early 1990s.
2 On the theoretical importance of emphasizing failure rather than success in commu-
nication, see Ang (1996), Chapter 10.
3 For a historical analysis of the construction of this hegemonic male identity in imperial
Britain, see C. Hall (1992).
4 A compilation of the international debate on The Good Woman of Bangkok, see Berry
et al. (1997).
5 While most white feminist critics have come out as Madonna enthusiasts, there are
exceptions, see, for example, Bordo (1993).
6 See, however, Patton (1993).
7 It should be added that ‘whiteness’, too, is a structurally impure position, deriving its
very meaning from suppressing and othering that which is not white. But while the
centre, by virtue of its being the centre, can subsequently repress the marginalized

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