Books
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022
This paper discusses how ideas of “race” and racial identification have, in
different ways, been... more This paper discusses how ideas of “race” and racial identification have, in
different ways, been central in the construction of modern nation-states,
both in East Asia and in postcolonial Southeast Asia, helping to entrench
notions of racial difference as a fundamental element in nation-building.
Processes of human racialization – and consequently, the homogenization of
racialized identities and essentialization of human inequality – are thus
persistent structuring devices that organize the workings of human societies.
The paper focuses especially on the complex and contradictory ramifications
of the racialization of “the Chinese” inside and outside of China, threatening
to take on a perilous turn in the current era of China’s rising global power
and heightened Sinophobia.
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‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisd... more ‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of ‘the East’ in ‘the West’. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference.
By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a placein Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an inte-connected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations.. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
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First published at Het Geval Dallas by Uitgeverij SUA Amsterdam © 1982 Uitgeverij SUA Amsterdam E... more First published at Het Geval Dallas by Uitgeverij SUA Amsterdam © 1982 Uitgeverij SUA Amsterdam English translation (with revisions) first published in 1985 by Methuen &c Co. Ltd Reprinted 1989, 1991, 1993, 1996 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Transferred to Digital Printing 2005 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 1985 Methuen & Co. Ltd Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or ...
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The Art of Engagement investigates contemporary art projects which aim to establish a unique coll... more The Art of Engagement investigates contemporary art projects which aim to establish a unique collaborative process by bringing artists together with businesses, other organisations, and communities.
This book documents exemplary collaborations between artists Craig Walsh, Sylvie Blocher, Ash Keating, and Jeanne van Heeswijk, and business partners from Sydney including a Rugby League team, and environmental and waste management companies to demonstrate that the community is everywhere: in the artwork, at the sites of artistic expression and in the reactions to the works produced by C3West.
The Art of Engagement explores the aesthetic, political and economic dimensions of each project and features quality images and documentation of the completed C3West projects.
As a reference for the art world in Australia and internationally, this book will appeal to both visual and performing artists, those who work within the arts, or are engaged in cultural studies.
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This is a comprehensive history of the Australia's multicultural broadcasting organisation, the S... more This is a comprehensive history of the Australia's multicultural broadcasting organisation, the Special Broadcasting Service.
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Articles and Book Chapters
Modern Asian Studies, 2019
In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who w... more In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who were marginalized and considered 'other' by the dominant society. In Western eyes, these areas were the no-go zones of the Oriental 'other'. Now, more than a hundred years later, traditional Chinatowns still exist in some cities but their meaning and role has been transformed, while in other cities entirely new Chinatowns have emerged. This article discusses how Chinatowns today are increasingly contested sites where older diasporic understandings of Chineseness are unsettled by newer, neoliberal interpretations, dominated by the pull of China's new-found economic might. In particular, the so-called 'rise of China' has spawned a globalization of the idea of 'Chinatown' itself, with its actual uptake in urban development projects the world over, or a backlash against it, determined by varying perceptions of China's global ascendancy as an amalgam of threat and opportunity.
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European Journal of Cultural Studies, 1998
This article reflects on the difficulties of practising cultural studies in a transnational, cros... more This article reflects on the difficulties of practising cultural studies in a transnational, cross-cultural context by interrogating the popular metaphors of the 'crossroads' and the 'borderlands' as the spaces for trangression, heteroglossia and radical openness. The article argues that despite the increased intensity of communication and exchange of ideas across national, cultural, and geographical borders (both within cultural studies and in the social world at large), distinctions between the 'local' and the 'non-local' remain crucial in determining the specific and variegated meanings accrued to general or 'global' concepts such as 'race', 'nation' and 'identity'. The article concludes that our crossroads encounters would be more productive if we recognize the moments of actual disconnection rather than hold on to the utopian ideal of connectedness so bound up with celebrations of the 'borderlands'.
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M. Morris and B. de Bary (eds) "Race" Panic and the Memory of Migration, 2001
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D. Crowley & D. Mitchell (eds.). Communication Theory Today, 1994
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Journal of Australian Studies , 2017
Chinatowns have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves that
were despised by the dominant We... more Chinatowns have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves that
were despised by the dominant Western culture, while
functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile
white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised
world, the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they
have become more open, hybrid and transnational urban spaces,
increasingly interconnected within the broader Asia-Pacific region.
For Asian Australians, Chinatown may be a site of conflicting
memories of Australia’s racist history and of cultural
marginalisation and ethnic survival, but it is also—in today’s
multicultural and cosmopolitan age—an area to be claimed for
the expression of new Asian Australian identities. In Sydney’s
Chinatown, public art projects by Asian Australian artists such as
Jason Wing and Lindy Lee articulate some of the complexities and
ambiguities of what it means to be Asian in Australia today.
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Routledge , 2019
Published in the Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication, Edited by Kirsten Drotne... more Published in the Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication, Edited by Kirsten Drotner, Vince Dziekan, Ross Parry and Kim Christian Schroeder.
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The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, Ed Tony Bennett and John Frow, 2008
Overview of the evolution of Cultural Studies as an '(inter)discipline, whose distinctiveness res... more Overview of the evolution of Cultural Studies as an '(inter)discipline, whose distinctiveness resides in analysing 'culture as a series of 'sites of struggle'. Published in The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis, ed Tony Bennett and John Frow, 2008
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International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2016
Throughout his long career Stuart Hall has personified a shifting range of political-intellectual... more Throughout his long career Stuart Hall has personified a shifting range of political-intellectual positionalities, responding to the changing historical conjuncture in the West since the late 1950s. From his engagement with the New Left to the generation of new spaces for critical intellectual intervention in the 1970s (as embodied by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) to the tightening up of such spaces as a consequence of the neoliberal ascendancy (which Hall himself theorized through his analysis of Thatcherism) from the 1980s onwards, the role of the intellectual/academic has changed significantly throughout this period, as universities have become increasingly corporatized. This article tracks this evolution by tracing the paradoxical fate of cultural studies as an intellectual project and academic formation, and Hall's ultimate distancing from it at the end of his life.
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Books
different ways, been central in the construction of modern nation-states,
both in East Asia and in postcolonial Southeast Asia, helping to entrench
notions of racial difference as a fundamental element in nation-building.
Processes of human racialization – and consequently, the homogenization of
racialized identities and essentialization of human inequality – are thus
persistent structuring devices that organize the workings of human societies.
The paper focuses especially on the complex and contradictory ramifications
of the racialization of “the Chinese” inside and outside of China, threatening
to take on a perilous turn in the current era of China’s rising global power
and heightened Sinophobia.
By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a placein Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an inte-connected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations.. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
This book documents exemplary collaborations between artists Craig Walsh, Sylvie Blocher, Ash Keating, and Jeanne van Heeswijk, and business partners from Sydney including a Rugby League team, and environmental and waste management companies to demonstrate that the community is everywhere: in the artwork, at the sites of artistic expression and in the reactions to the works produced by C3West.
The Art of Engagement explores the aesthetic, political and economic dimensions of each project and features quality images and documentation of the completed C3West projects.
As a reference for the art world in Australia and internationally, this book will appeal to both visual and performing artists, those who work within the arts, or are engaged in cultural studies.
Articles and Book Chapters
were despised by the dominant Western culture, while
functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile
white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised
world, the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they
have become more open, hybrid and transnational urban spaces,
increasingly interconnected within the broader Asia-Pacific region.
For Asian Australians, Chinatown may be a site of conflicting
memories of Australia’s racist history and of cultural
marginalisation and ethnic survival, but it is also—in today’s
multicultural and cosmopolitan age—an area to be claimed for
the expression of new Asian Australian identities. In Sydney’s
Chinatown, public art projects by Asian Australian artists such as
Jason Wing and Lindy Lee articulate some of the complexities and
ambiguities of what it means to be Asian in Australia today.
different ways, been central in the construction of modern nation-states,
both in East Asia and in postcolonial Southeast Asia, helping to entrench
notions of racial difference as a fundamental element in nation-building.
Processes of human racialization – and consequently, the homogenization of
racialized identities and essentialization of human inequality – are thus
persistent structuring devices that organize the workings of human societies.
The paper focuses especially on the complex and contradictory ramifications
of the racialization of “the Chinese” inside and outside of China, threatening
to take on a perilous turn in the current era of China’s rising global power
and heightened Sinophobia.
By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a placein Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an inte-connected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations.. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
This book documents exemplary collaborations between artists Craig Walsh, Sylvie Blocher, Ash Keating, and Jeanne van Heeswijk, and business partners from Sydney including a Rugby League team, and environmental and waste management companies to demonstrate that the community is everywhere: in the artwork, at the sites of artistic expression and in the reactions to the works produced by C3West.
The Art of Engagement explores the aesthetic, political and economic dimensions of each project and features quality images and documentation of the completed C3West projects.
As a reference for the art world in Australia and internationally, this book will appeal to both visual and performing artists, those who work within the arts, or are engaged in cultural studies.
were despised by the dominant Western culture, while
functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile
white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised
world, the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they
have become more open, hybrid and transnational urban spaces,
increasingly interconnected within the broader Asia-Pacific region.
For Asian Australians, Chinatown may be a site of conflicting
memories of Australia’s racist history and of cultural
marginalisation and ethnic survival, but it is also—in today’s
multicultural and cosmopolitan age—an area to be claimed for
the expression of new Asian Australian identities. In Sydney’s
Chinatown, public art projects by Asian Australian artists such as
Jason Wing and Lindy Lee articulate some of the complexities and
ambiguities of what it means to be Asian in Australia today.
contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state.
Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seemingly
unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national),
multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) and diaspora (the ethnic
transcends the national) cannot capture the diverse difficulties, ambivalences and
failures of identification, belonging and political agency experienced by Chinese
Australians. A more satisfactory analysis requires a questioning of the groupness of ‘the
Chinese’ (as well as ‘the Australians’) and overcoming conceptual groupism
(Brubaker): the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous
and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life. Instead a more
processual and flexible understanding is proposed, where the relationship between
‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is one of constant evolution and mutual entanglement.
relations towards Asia, particularly China. This has led Australia to officially embrace Asia as its
regional home. But the neoliberal economic logic underpinning this embrace leads to a narrowly
transactional conception of Australia’s relationship to Asia, governed by an opportunity/threat
dichotomy. By contrast, this article describes Sydney’s Chinatown today as an increasingly
hybrid, porous and transnational space of uneven and mixed-up, embodied Asian-Australianness.
Juxtaposing the dynamic on-the-ground reality of this contemporary Chinatown with government
discourse on Australia’s relationship to Asia, as exemplified by the 2012 White Paper Australia in
the Asian Century, illuminates that Australia is not yet at home in Asia.
a structure of feeling which has grown more pervasive in the 21st century. How do we
find ways of navigating the complex challenges of our time? And what role can we, as
cultural researchers, play in this task? Much humanities and social science scholarship in
the past few decades has embraced complexity, so much so that the pursuit of complexity
(e.g. in scholarly theorizing) has become an end in itself, a key element in the production
of cultural critique. In this essay, I argue that if we wish to engage with the real-world
need to deal with complex realities, cultural research must go beyond deconstructive
cultural critique and work towards what I call ‘cultural intelligence’. The development of
sophisticated and sustainable responses to the world’s complex problems requires the
recognition of complexity, not for complexity’s own sake, but because simplistic
solutions are unsustainable or counter-productive. At the same time, cultural intelligence
also recognizes the need for simplification to combat the paralyzing effects of
complexity. Developing simplifications should not be equated with being simplistic.
While being simplistic is tantamount to a reductionism which dispenses with
complexity, simplification allows us to plot a course through complexity. To put the
question simply, how does one simplify without being simplistic?"
ideals-driven and practiced largely by non-state actors, the authors pursue a twofold aim. First, to demystify the field, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; second, to better understand how actually-existing discourses of cultural diplomacy and/or cultural relations operate in different
national contexts. The essay seeks in particular to scrutinize the current confusion surrounding cultural diplomacy and, in the context of the changing role of the nation-state, to explore its possibilities as an instrument for going beyond the national interest.
By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a place in Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an inter-connected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.