Dean Chan, (Panel Chair)

Introduction: “Asian=UnAustralian?”

Welcome to the inaugural panel presentation by members of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network. The network was formed this year to build research capacity and profile, and sustain momentum, in this field which I personally encountered in 1999 at the first Asian Australian Identities conference that was held at the Australian National University, and convened by Jacqueline Lo, Helen Gilbert, and Tseen Khoo. I can still remember the striking image emblazoned on the conference programme. Visual artist Greg Leong had produced what I thought was a very unsettling self-portrait, an image of what Olivia Khoo might term “the sacrificial Asian” in Hanson’s One Nation. Indeed, many of the papers at that landmark conference directly engaged with the ramifications of Hansonist politics. Such was the historical context and immediate politicised impetus for a key moment in the evolution of Asian Australian Studies.

 

Today, I am back again in Canberra, back again as part of an Asian Australian Studies grouping, not too long before the second Asian Australian Identities conference due to be held in Melbourne in June 2007. But guess who’s just declared to the media that she is also back again and planning to return to federal politics? Nevertheless, this is a very different cultural moment. So much has changed, but so much more has not.

Much more lies ahead for Asian Australian Studies. Today’s panel can only aspire to provide you with a partial view of an increasingly diverse and expanding constellation of critical enquiry. The concept of embodied knowledge is directly discussed in two of the papers, but it also informs the others, effectively serving as a leitmotif in this panel, be it with reference to parliamentary speeches, visual and performance art, or durian the fruit and, specifically, its ice cream incarnation.

 

The papers are unified in interrogating embodied knowledge of Australianness, particularly those paradigms that can only ever serve to cast Asianness as antithetical (at worst) or ancillary (at best) to the corpus of the nation. Thus, socialisation processes are key to both the equation and the question. The equation and question marks in our panel title are not simply speculative, but fundamentally interrogative.

 

Throughout this conference, we have heard many papers that address how critique – especially critique along certain lines by uncertainly positioned individuals – has become indicted as un-Australian. Many presenters have already articulated eloquent and incisive analyses of such machinations. Asian Australian critical practice is very much part of this larger cultural conversation and political praxis. Asian Australian critique embeds an intrinsic critique of staid ideas about national fixity and the exclusionary social practices engendered by conceptions of bounded nationhood.

 

Yet, as some Asian Australian scholars have recently observed (and experienced first hand), there is still a keen sense within some sectors of the academy that the likes of Asian Australian Studies serve only as a platform for an uncritical celebration of minority cultures. Indeed, if anything, un-Australianness as a disciplinary practice is underscored here. At stake also is the disciplining of attitudes, ideas, cultures, bodies.

 

Larissa Behrendt’s powerful opening keynote address, particularly when she reminded us of the lived consequences of politico-legal frameworks and the social fact that the Indigenous life expectancy is 17 years shorter than the national average, altogether serves as a polemical cue for this panel session. Bodies, social lives, and cultural practices do matter. Their complicated entanglements remain a matter for continual critical scrutiny.

[Back to top]

 

Jen Tsen Kwok
The Production of Ethnic Identity and Difference in the First Speeches of Asian Australian Parliamentarians
The parliamentary first speech is classically an opportunity for state and Federal parliamentarians to reflect upon the political values and motivations that have guided their entry into political life. The production of self in this context is conditioned and guided by particular social subjectivities. As Pierre Bourdieu coins through his notion of habitus, embodied traits structure our existence in the world and thus necessitate particular dispositions that function because of such embodiments. For Asian Australian parliamentarians these subjectivities take on an additional complexity in the negotiation between ethnic identity, national identity and compliance to the conventions of state power. The parliamentary first speech represents a discursively privileged site in which Australian citizenship permits and authorises particular notions of ethnic difference. Through the mimetic performance of familiar ethnic identities, the parliamentary first speech gestures to 'Un-Australia.' These performances reflect the discursive tropes Asian Australian parliamentarians must employ to protect themselves from being 'sent' to such a place.

 

[Back to top]

 

Simon Choo
Your habitus stinks! Emplacing durian through a sensory anthropology of food
As he lay on his deathbed in Perth, Willi Hans Boehm's thoughts drifted to Malaysia and to the memory of the taste of durian ice-cream from the Kek Seng Coffee Shop in Penang. What followed was an incredible outpouring of transnational solidarity through which Malaysian/Australian networks mobilized in an attempt to fulfill this dying man's desire for the taste of durian. This paper applies phenomenological understandings of the body, experience and perception within the frame of Bourdieu's habitus, to explore the relationship between identity, memory, taste and the senses through an anthropology of food.

[Back to top]

 

Christine Clark
Echoes of Home, but which one? Contemporary Art by Asian Australians
The recent prominence of emigrant artists from Asia in Australia's contemporary art trajectory is considerable, and has significantly influenced contemporary Australian art and craft. While viewed as Asian Australian practitioners within the industry, many of these artists' works address issues - although related to their life in Australia - that many would view as unaustralian. My aim in this paper is present the work of several of these artists.

[Back to top]

Jacqueline Lo
'Queer Magic': Performing Mixed-race on the Stage
While recent deployments of hybridity have been useful both theoretically and politically in unmasking and subverting power asymmetries, the result of the disavowal of racial essentialism characterising nineteenth century applications of hybridity has been the excising of the drama of the flesh. The culturalist turn in conceptualising hybridity is inherently logocentric. Bodily presence and embodied knowledges that exceed and supplement language is often disregarded in poststructuralist reformation of hybridity as a deconstructive device. My aim in this presentation is to refigure the body back into hybridity-talk and to explore the aporia between racial hybridity and its culturalist interpretations by focusing on the modes of embodying mixed-race Aboriginality in some paradigmatic Australian performance texts.

 

[Back to top]

 

CONFERENCE REPORT: Jen Tsen Kwok
'Asian=UnAustralian?' Panel Presentation at the CSAA Conference

The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia's (CSAA) UnAustralia conference was held at the University of Canberra and provided an idyllic setting for the exploration of an ascending nationalistic bravado within Australian public spheres.

 

Dean Chan chaired our panel, opening with some background about the network and a suite of observations that brought us into the overall conference themes. The other speakers - Simon Choo, Christine Clark and Jacquie Lo - delivered a wealth of unique and insightful analysis into Asian Australian engagements with the notion of an 'UnAustralia'.

 

Simon did a great paper about transnational durian enthusiasts such as the German expat William Boehm, durian consumption, and drew upon the theoretical work of both Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty to show the transformative potential of habitus.

 

Christine provided a fascinating paper on transnational intersections in the works of three artists featured at the Museum of Brisbane 'Echoes of Home' exhibition: Pamela Mei-Leng See,Savanhdary Vongpoothorn and Dadang Christanto.

 

Jacquie concluded with a paper based on her article 'Queer Magic' exploring the genealogy of hybridity through its racialised past and exploring hybrid rearticulations in the slideshow performance of Lucy Dann and Mayu Kanamori, called 'Heart of the Journey'.

 

What the papers insisted upon were the overlapping, multi-faceted and situated forces that embody the production of self - to draw from Jacquie's conclusions on hybridity, the ways in which our 'in-betweenness' simultaneously reflects a certain 'caught-betweenness'. I personally drew from these papers a certain ''spectral' ambivalence attached to nationalistic modes of identification. Something I believe far transcends the Asian Australian experience.

Most importantly, the papers and panel discussion revitalised my excitement relating to Asian Australian Studies and its potential to create powerful and emotionally tangible narratives and perspectives that sit in the cracks between dominant and hegemonic discourses.

[Back to top]