ARTICLE - Common Ground? Deploying Asian North American Studies in Australia
ABSTRACT: Asian Australian Studies is a relatively new field of research, but one that is forging a stronger profile within diasporic Asian studies. It is an area that has grown in conjunction with scholarly interest in Asian diasporas, and comparative diasporic communities and cultures. The 2006 founding of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network marks an important step in the establishment and formalisation of the field, but what might this mean for the area and its engagement with cognate disciplines? This essay examines in detail the influence if Asian North American Studies on this emerging area, and the ways in which Asian Australian Studies has developed. The second part of the essay addresses the practical aspects of comparative diasporic work, including the politics of funding such research, and focuses on issues of cultural and academic ‘exports’ for Australia and Canada.
This article appeared in the European collection Virtually American? Denationalizing North American Studies (Ed. Mita Banerjee. Heidelberg: Carl Winter UP, 2009). The edited book features work by key European and North American scholars, including Alfred Hornung (Johannes Gutenberg‐U Mainz), Ingrid Gessner (U of Regensburg), Roy Miki (Simon Fraser U) and Ashok Mathur (Thompson Rivers U).