‘Being Asian in Australia and the United States’ explores Asian identities and cultures in the West. What kinds of cultural formations, representations and identifications emerge as a result of specific histories and contemporary sociocultural conditions? How are such ethnic representations linked to concepts of cultural belonging or exclusion? Through detailed case studies that engage with visual arts, popular culture, academia and community cultural festivals in Australia and the US, we will analyse critical influences on the construction and circulation of Asian diasporic subjectivities. At stake here is the question of not only how diasporic Asians are represented, but how they represent themselves as well.
The project’s specific aims are to:
Improve understanding of the ways in which diasporic Asians position and represent themselves in Western nation states.
Examine the ways in which diasporic Asians negotiate systems of power and knowledge as a result of specific national histories of racialisation.
Interrogate the generalised relevance and applicability of Asian American paradigms that dominate diasporic Asian studies.
Develop Asian Australian cultural studies and pioneer its engagement with cognate debates in Asian American studies.
‘Being Asian in Australia and the United States’ began in 2008.
