Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora (CSCSD) in Canberra

About:
"The Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora is the only centre in the southern hemisphere for research on people of Chinese descent in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. The Centre seeks to stimulate and encourage scholarship that reflects the diversity of and intercourse among areas, cultures and political economies in the region, and contributes critically to the field of knowledge.

At the top of our research agenda is a scholarship which looks beyond the stereotyped masks of "Chinese" and "Chineseness", and focuses instead on exploring the fluid and multifaceted nature of Chinese diaspora experience in Southeast Asia, its various interfaces with indigenous people and states, its multiple positions in economies, societies and politics, and its global positioning.

As a center based in Australia, we are inevitably interested in the studies of the Australian Chinese Community, particularly in the location of their history within the larger narrative of the Chinese southern diaspora. The conventional narrative on Chinese diaspora has been filtered, consciously or unconsciously, so as to conform to a common story that tells the tale of a unique "Chineseness" manifesting at different times and places. A regional and geographical approach is one way to liberate the study of overseas Chinese from its nationalist straight jacket and to challenge the invented tradition of a unified essence of Chinese.

We see the CSCSD as a natural and logical venue to venture into this scholarship. The Centre hopes to add its Australian voice to the growing critique of this dominant scholarship,and to contribute to this important new current in studies of Chinese people outside China."

http://chl.anu.edu.au/sites/csds/about.php

RISE

I have been volunteering with RISE: Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees for almost 2 years, since I moved to Melbourne.

Those of my FB friends who may have been following the ongoing issue that has been the cruel and inhumane punishment of people seeking asylum in Australia, may be familiar with RISE, as the first refugee-, asylum seeker-, and ex-detainee-governed advocacy organisation in Australia (that we know of).

Being a part of RISE's organisational history has been a very meaningful one for me. Through my work there, I have made amazing new friends and comrades, learned SO MUCH about the pathological energies of globalism, (just as I live in a country that has also largely profited from its successes), and I have also gone through some extremely emotionally challenging times, where some previously amicable or even creative relationships have gone sour.

This all feels part and parcel of a journey through work and passion,
the exploration of tenacity, righteousness and resolve,
the messy work of sorting through the stuff of injustice and hopeful possibility,
the humbling reminders of my own frailty and imperfection
(indeed, also of my comrades and fellow travellers...),
my moments of weakness
and my moments also of greatest resilience.

The greatest paradox that I have held and straddled as an ally of and volunteer at RISE has been that of my position as someone of non-refugee background "taking up space" in a refugee-run organisation.

In many ways, I am deeply uncomfortable with a visible dualism in mainstream coverage that views asylum seekers as racially and culturally irreconcilably "Other" and materially pitiable, while Australians (including supportive, compassionate allies) are portrayed as largely white and middle class.

Indeed, I am also deeply uncomfortable with a world in which people become synonymous with their conditions of entry, in which people become "refugees" to become represented primarily as objects of persecution or pity.

I am deeply uncomfortable with this because there are so many complexities to the actual lived experiences of people who seek asylum (besides "pitiability"), particularly as they pertain to a broader problem of arbitrarily drafted and often colonially defined geographic and political boundaries.

All these boundaries, of the Australian country, that have had pernicious, long lasting impacts on a broad range of people, including Aboriginal Australians, all migrants, particularly poor migrants and migrants of colour, and people in general who may have been classified as non-White historically, but who have all, nevertheless, been resilient in survival and the genesis of Australian culture(s).

a dense and bewildering cauldron of
perplexing paradoxes

I feel a connection to RISE and am sensing, also, the legitimacy of the part I can play as a person, neither "refugee" nor comfortably "citizen", to the formation of what it means to both empathise with and identify with the people whom I show up to support,
perhaps by supporting others I am also supporting myself,
and that there is an exploration of what it is in me
that is implicated in both the problem and the solution.

Australian-Invasion Day, and Aboriginal Custodianship

the Federated states and territories of Australia

"Australia Day"
is annually held on the 26th of January, and is celebrated as Australia's "National Day"
commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet of the ships that left Great Britain carrying convicts and settlers to this land, arriving at the port which is now Sydney.

So begins the national day of this country, commemorating Anglo settlement and colonisation.
Also known as Invasion Day and Survival Day.



This Invasion Day event on Facebook explains it best:

"The 26th January commonly known as "Australia day" is sold as a day to celebrate the 'lucky country' the date chosen to commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet, the 'discovery' of the Great Southern Land. The raising of the Union Jack symbolised British occupation of the eastern half of the continent claimed by Captain James Cook.

This date is more appropriately known to most First Nations people as Survival or Invasion day. It is also a day of mourning, we mourn the loss of land, culture, languages, we mourn the loss of freedom and abundance, and we mourn for the people who have, and continue to suffer under this disconnected, insatiable, violent and destructive imposed Capitalist system. Australia remains without Treaty, consent or compensation, the Stolen generation, stolen wages, dispossession, racism, assimilation, land theft continue."






Nearing this day,
I want to reflect, but briefly, on the issue of custodianship of the land.

the many Aboriginal language groups and nations of Australia

It seems to me that a major part of my cultural cringe in this country (a cultural cringe that I share, incidentally, with many other Australians as well) has to do in part with the way that we, as a country, not only relate in an ill-way to our country's Aboriginal inhabitants, but also to the land.

In Australia, settler peoples (this includes recent immigrants like myself) tend to hug the urbanised coastlines of Australia (e.g. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin), existing quite literally at this country's periphery, while claiming cultural hegemony and urban "centrality". Most the country's centre is desert, which is typically seen as more dangerous and uninhabitable, which of course reflects a certain... Euro-climate-normative idea of inhabitability...

Of course, Aboriginal people from diverse linguistic groups and nations have, for 40,000 years, wandered and lived across all of Australia's land, and, despite 3 centuries of displacement and genocide, necessarily retain a unique cultural custodianship over the land that we inhabit.



Here, I must necessarily set aside any rationalist biases, and come to embrace something quite a bit more "simple", in the encounter with Aboriginal custodianship as a political aspiration, as well as a lived cultural reality for many Aboriginal people (separate from the concept of land ownership)...

There is magic in this land that I am not, have not been, and perhaps cannot ever be privvy to... both as someone who is not ancestrally linked to this land, and as long as we, as a nation, do not reconcile ourselves with the ongoing ghettoisation of our Indigenous peoples...




Prior to 1967, Aboriginal people were not even allowed to vote
and indeed, were not even legally recognised as Humans.

Aboriginal people were classified under the Flora and Fauna Act.



I hold a lot of grief around this... Grief, so much grief for this land, and its desert "heart", and the heart of a government that deserted, no, til recently did not even recognise our Aboriginal people as people.

Through this grief, I also come to a place of quiet joy and gratitude, a place of wonder and awe, a place of hope.



A lovely poem,
Hate He Said
by Aboriginal Australian "malafella" on youtube
exploring grief around Australia Day...





... and for me?

to "belong" here...? What is my prerogative in this?
Me, global nomad, indigenous to nowhere for many generations.

I carry with me the spirit of wandering and chance upon this country as a clearing through global forest, and this is what I see.

I want to learn more...

on "Where are you From"?

I sometimes get asked "Where Are You From?"

This question is asked of me by people of many different backgrounds. Sometimes they are White/Anglo-Australian, sometimes they are European, sometimes they are Aboriginal Australian, sometimes they are other people of Asian descent.

Arlene Textaqueen, who describes themself as "brown... a non-Indigenous person of colour living on stolen Wurundjeri land in the area also known as Melbourne, Australia," has written a poem about being asked this question on their blog. The poem itself is understandably indignant, self-consciously defensive and naming of some of the potentially problematic assumptions that some people have in asking that question...

"Why do you ask?
Is it your curiosity in the ‘origin of my features’?
Is it your fascination for ‘other’ cultures and what they have to offer you?
Why do you desire to establish an exact definition of my difference?
Why do you assume I desire, and am able, to define this difference to you?
Do you show the same interest in determining the ‘ethnic make-up’ of every white face that you see?
Isn’t everyone from somewhere?
Do you not have a heritage?
Why does whiteness make yours invisible yet my brownness make mine subject to your anthropological investigation?
"

Textaqueen acknowledges that the poem is addressed to white people, and then goes on to articulate how they had performed this poem once at a RISE book launch and poetry slam. RISE is the first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to be run and governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees, and is based here in Melbourne.

Textaqueen writes,
"My poem is addressed to white people, like most of my poetry, but it’s not for them. Judging from the laughter it received from many people of colour in the audience (POCS made up the majority of attendees), the people I had hoped would get it, really got it. I did see some uncomfortable white people and this was unfortunately acknowledged by the MC, Victor Victor, after I left the stage, when he apologised if anyone was offended, because that wasn’t ‘our’ intention as it was a night about ‘positivity’. Ramesh, CEO and co-founder of RISE, did ask him to take back the apology, which he did the next time he was on stage. Is there any person, especially any white person, who couldn’t do with being challenged on their less obvious (to them) racisms? And how, and why, should I do that without making some people uncomfortable? Especially considering, as a person of colour living in a white-centric world, I’m always adapting to ‘uncomfortable’ circumstances."

They then go on to give excellent critique and commentary about a culture of white "do-gooder"ness which is also predicated, though perhaps more subtly, on white supremacy and entitlement.


****

"Where I am From!"

While I acknowledge the anger and frustration that Textaqueen is articulating in their post around this question, I have a different experience around this.

First of all, recently, at a RISE Festival fundraiser gathering which I was volunteering at in Federation Square, I was asked "Where are you from?" all day long by African men and women, many of whom are from recently arrived migrant and refugee backgrounds. I would, in turn, ask them the same question, at which point I would hear their stories of migration from here to there, Somalia to Ethiopia, Eritrea to the UAE, and the eventuation of our bodies to being here together, in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (on stolen Wurundjeri Aboriginal land).

Our asking these questions of one another was, of course, contextualised by the fact that the whole daylong event was being run by people of colour, and while nominally intended for a broad audience, was disproportionately and visibly attended by other people of colour. That I was asked this question by African folks through the day did not strike me as coming from a place of entitled interrogation, but from a mutual urge to share of our personal history, to share in migrant solidarity, and, in my motivation anyway, in how we might build community together.

Of course, it is different when white people ask me this in white-dominant spaces, but there is a dynamic shift I want to help catalyse; in which this recourse to poetry, as Arlene has written, is less and less needed. Where I can measure the relative worth of a question not only by the extent to which it actively challenges white supremacist and white-normative ways of knowing, but also by the extent to which it is predicated on the shared commitments to learning and sharing of one another (and one another's histories), and to building connection and "country" with one another.

This also means that I am committed to exploring alternatives to addressing pieces on my racial anger toward white people in general. I am interested in building and nurturing a community of other people of colour who value our own subjectivity enough that we would write literature for one another, with one another as an intended audience, not simply in indictment of white people (as important as this may be in its own right), but in mutual inquiry as well.

I honour Textaqueen's anger; indeed, I share that feeling often, but the question "Where are you from" does not belong to white people, and I am personally invested in reclaiming it as a person of colour. "Where are you from" is also a way that people of colour become agents in anthropology (the study of human beings and comparative human cultures), of ourselves, of white people, and of the dominant (white hegemonic) cultures that we are a part of shaping and reshaping.

Personally, while contextually necessary, I am lethargic of a politics of ressentiment, of building personal and communal political identities and movements based primarily on outrage, indignation, and the introjection of our own Otherness. Let's build contexts together in which lethargy and righteous rage are not our modus operandi.

I believe being openly angry at white folks is one way that we "get over it".
(i.e. by naming and directing our anger at white people)

I would like to find some other ways as well, which include discourses, creative methodologies, and ways of being with one another, which go beyond looking for the most powerful ways to stare white people out of the room.

reductio ad absurdum

by the marvellous Australian poet, cartoonist and mystic,

Michael Leunig

Coloured Paper

My original post on this is on the Melbourne Colouring Book

A few days ago, the Australian Government released
The White Paper : Australia in the Asian Century, which "sets out a strategic framework to guide Australia’s navigation of the Asian Century."


The official website says more:

"The scale and pace of Asia’s transformation is unprecedented and the implications for Australia are profound. Australia’s geographic proximity, depth of skills, stable institutions and forward-looking policy settings place it in a unique position to take advantage of the growing influence of the Asian region.

The Australian Government commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century to consider the likely economic and strategic changes in the region and what more can be done to position Australia for the Asian Century"



An example of an action that the paper raises is around a long-term investment in "Asia literacy", including mandating that schools across Australia will teach at least one of four priority Asian languages (Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese).

This, of course, has interesting implications for our national identity. Australia has, colloquially, tended to be referred to (by others, and also self-referentially), as a "Western country," despite being more accurately geographically situated as an island in the South Pacific (Northwest of Aotearoa New Zealand, and mostly actually Southeast of our closest continental neighbour: Asia)...

The word "Western" is very loaded, of course, and I interpret this to mean that Australia tends to trace its national heritage to European, U.S. American, and Anglicised continental roots, while paying lip service to our indigenous Aboriginal heritage. Another connotation of the word "Western," beyond cultural legacy, is of course the suggestion of Whiteness...

There is something quite powerful, as a statement, about nationally committing ourselves to being more geographically honest, in this regard, while also being most economically feasible as a long-term national and cultural investment in this sort of regionalism, in Asia...

A wonderful essay has been written in the Sydney Morning Herald which explores some of these implications...:

Australia's Asian-ness is barely visible

by Tim Soutphommasane




Now, I am no politician nor economist, but as a layperson, and as a citizen, I write this post as mere conjecture:
As a queer Asian-Australian man, the thought of an "Asian Century" intrigues me.

The phrase itself speaks to the part of me that is perhaps embarrassingly parochial... Since I was 3 years old, I have not lived in a country in which I was a citizen, nor, since my adult life, one in which I was part of a racial or ethnic majority... I am, of course, simultaneously critical of the ways that nationalist identities can and do reinforce certain forms of racial and cultural supremacy. Extreme nationalism to me has often been suggestive of violence, and at least in the context of the USA and Australia, a subtle and not-so-subtle White supremacy.





And then:
There is something in here, in the metaphor of the "White Paper" and the "Asian Century" which interests me, from a queer perspective.


First, to play with this:
What of a metaphor of Coloured Paper?
(as a metaphorical canvas upon which we could explore policy as well as culture?)

What of a Queer Asian Century?

What does multiculturalism look like, outside of a "Western" framework?
What room is there, given the explicit use of the term "Asian" (as opposed to, for example, "Eastern"), to raise issues not just of multiculturalism (such as Australia has done thus far), but also of multiracialism (e.g. in the case example of Singapore)...? What are the implications of including this explicit discourse of race, given the racially-charged name of the "Asian Century"?
As Soutphommasane has written, where are all of the Asian people in this country already, in terms of being featured in positions of civil service?
What would it mean to inherit a British Parliamentary system, including a number of the cultural 'advancements' that we have made as a country for example around the decriminalisation of homosexuality, when we contrast this with other countries in Asia (or the Asia-Pacific region)?

What happens when a baton is passed, from an Anglo-normative government to a pluralistically Asian-normative government?
Is this actually going to happen?

And what will race look like in such a context?
What will racism look like in such a context?