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Exploration of how Australia and Asia are interwined in everyday culture, and in the imagined worlds of Australians of all backgrounds. Investigates Asian cultural production of art, literature, media and performance that embody Asian social and cultural experiences. Includes endnotes, bibliography and index. Ang and Chalmers work in the School of Cultural Studies at University of Western Sydney. Law and Thomas are Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellows at Australian National University and the Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies respectively.
This is the first book ever to present a comparative reading of East Asian-Australian and East Asian-Canadian novels while addressing the literary and political cultures of Australia and Canada. Generally, the book examines the limits and possibilities for these diasporic literatures in multicultural societies and their placement in relation to national literatures. Issues discussed in the book include: citizenship/belonging, community, images of suburbia, tensions in gender/sexuality, and recycling traditional folklore for contemporary situations. The book offers new perspectives on Australian and Canadian life and society, addressing contemporary anxieties about citizenship, cohesion in multicultural communities, ideas of ‘homeland,’ and the cultural potential of the ‘melting pot.’ The author offers extensive background information so that those unfamiliar with either Australian or Canadian material can quickly acquaint themselves with the necessary contexts as well as delving further into their details. Its comparative approach offers a unique way to deal with issues of diasporic ‘asian-ness’ (a dynamic area of study) and national stereotypes. The book also provides a useful counter-point to recent discussions of Asian-American literature. “Tseen Khoo offers a fascinating and insightful study of the politics and poetics of literary production by Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian writers and image-makers. The comparative methodology, (including the contrasts made to the Asian-American context) usefully resituates debates about nationalism, cultural policies and diasporic histories away from narrow nationalist frameworks to afford a more global perspective.” —Jacqueline Lo, School of Humanities, Australian National University “This is an original and timely contribution to debates in diasporic Asian literatures. The author knows her Australian material extremely well and situates these within important and very relevant discussions concerning both cultural and political issues. The comparisons with Canada (and to some degree Asian American material) are also very well-informed. Overall, the book is a pleasure to read.” —Professor Sneja Gunew, Professor of English and Women’s Studies, University of British Columbia
In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia' and `the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese' with `Asian' identity. Ang then turns to `the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a `Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia' and `the West' to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between', arguing for a theorising not of `difference' but of `togetherness' in contemporary societies.
This Book Is A Critical Intervention Into Debates On Australia S Cultural History. The Book Demonstrates The Interconnectedness Of Themes Commonly Seen As Separate Discursive Formations, And Shows The Fruitfulness Of Bringing A Combined Cultural Studies And Post-Colonial Approach To Bear On A Number Of Fields, Seen As Pivotal To The Formation And Particular Expression Of Australian Culture Today. The Book Argues That A Redefinition Of The Borders Between What Has Been Regarded And Patrolled As Discrete Fields Of Australian Studies Is Mandatory In Order To Alter Definitions Of Australia S Cultural History And Identity Away From The Conventional Histories Of A Settler Culture Gradually Embracing A Multicultural Society. The Introduction Argues For The Productiveness Of Combining A Cultural Studies Approach With Post-Colonial Criticism And Explains Why The Placement Of Australian Cultural History In The Unconventional Territorial Representation Of Its Asian Other Is Not Only Enabling But Necessary In Order To Divest Australian Studies Of Settlement History S Monolithic Grasp On Definitions Of Australia S Cultural History. The Subsequent Chapters Examine Australian Historiography (Focusing On Colonial Beginnings), Political History (Focusing On Relations With Indonesia And East Timor), Multiculturalism (Focusing On The Chinese In Australia), And Anthropology (Focusing On Aboriginal- Asian Contact History) From This New Angle.
This book describes the ethnic identity construction involved in ‘being’, ‘feeling’ and ‘doing’ Chinese for multi-generation Australian-born Chinese, who were born and raised in a different social environment. It demonstrates how Chineseness is manifested in a multitude of ways and totally debunks any notion that being Chinese is a simple identity marker. The book shows that while there are commonalities with the American-born, the experiences of Australia-born Chinese are distinct in many ways. This book is a timely and critically examination of the inescapability of Chineseness particularly when social and economic stability is threatened and those in power are looking for a scapegoat.
From David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly to Evelyn Lau's Diary of a Runaway to Fred Wah's poetry, diasporic Chinese literature in English is reaching wider audiences. The interdisciplinary essays in Culture, Identity, Commodity provide close textual readings and general theoretical frameworks from American, Australian, and Canadian perspectives for a range of textual productions - novels, autobiographies, plays, and Chinese cooking shows - that address this dynamic field. Established and emerging scholars offer timely discussions of "diasporic Chinese studies," drawing on transnational, postcolonial, globalisation, and racialisation theories. The collection examines what is at stake in the consideration of diasporic literatures and the connections and fissures emerging in these new critical terrains. Book jacket.
Locating Asian Australian Cultures is a timely and challenging interdisciplinary compilation that sets a contemporary benchmark for Asian Australian studies and its future directions. In the dynamic field of diasporic Asian studies, Asian Australian Studies is an emerging and contentious area. While cognisant of issues and critical developments in North America, Europe, and Asia, Asian Australian studies forges its own specific engagements with questions of identity, racialization, and nationalisms in a world of globalized cultures and movements. This book deliberately engages with international perspectives on Asian Australian studies that offer contingent connections and address crucial questions for fields that are rapidly 'de-nationalizing'. The volume focuses on Asian Australian cultural production and identity, presenting work that interrogates notions of belonging and citizenship, representational politics, and disciplinarity in the academy. The broad-ranging essays examine the politics of Asian Australian art and literature, as well as the area's significant interventions in disciplinary formations nationally and internationally. Other essays discuss the Vietnamese War memorial in Cabramatta, notions of the 'sacrificial Asian' in contemporary films, and Chinatown sites in Australia. This book will be essential reading not only for researchers in Asian Australian studies but also for those with an interest in Asian diaspora and Australian studies.
Based on fieldwork conducted between 2001-2008 in urban East Africa, this book explores who the patients, practitioners and paraprofessionals doing Chinese medicine were in this early period of renewed China-Africa relations. Rather than taking recourse to the ‘placebo effect’, the author explains through the spatialities and materialities of the medical procedures provided why - apart from purchasing the Chinese antimalarial called Artemisinin - locals would try out their ‘alternatively modern’ formulas for treating a wide range of post-colonial disorders and seek their sexual enhancement medicines.
As China rose to its position of global superpower, Chinese groups in the West watched with anticipation and trepidation. For members of China’s diasporic community, the rise of China created ripples of change, influencing communities, culture, and communication, and even challenging the very concept of diaspora. Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China examines how artists, writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals from the Chinese diaspora responded to China’s ascendancy by representing it to global audiences with a new-found vitality and self-assurance. The chapters, often personal in nature, cover locations as varied as Australia, North America, and Tibet. And yet, the focus of each is the nexus between the political and economic rise of China and the cultural products this period produced, a place where new ideas of nation, identity, and diaspora were forged.
In the 1990s and 2000s, contemporary art in India changed radically in form, as an art world once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance. In response to the liberalization of India’s economy, art was cultivated by a booming market as well as by new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. The result was an unprecedented efflorescence of contemporary art and growth of a network of institutions radiating out from India. Among the first studies of contemporary South Asian art, Infrastructure and Form engages with sixteen of India’s leading contemporary artists and art collectives to examine what made this development possible. Karin Zitzewitz articulates the connections among formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. By untangling the complex interactions of infrastructure and form, the book offers a discussion of the barriers and conduits that continue to shape global contemporary art and its relationship to capital more broadly.