Ien Ang

Asianing Australia: Notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies

Abstract This paper attempts to develop a critical transnationalist perspective in cultural studies from the localized cultural and political context of contemporary ‘Australia’. It takes the Australian nation-states current geo-economic and geo-political preoccupation with a so-called ‘push into Asia’ as a starting point for a questioning of dominant discourses of international relations and the place of ‘Australia’ within it. In particular, the paper aims to deconstruct the binary divide between ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ which still informs official discourses of the ‘Asianization’ of Australia. In order to do this, it is suggested that the world must be conceived as a set of interconnected and interdependent, but distinctive modernities, signalling both the success and the failure of the universalizing European project of modernity through colonial expansion. From this historical perspective, ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia’ no longer appear as absolute binary opposites, as they can both be seen as historical produ...

Navigating complexity: From cultural critique to cultural intelligence

That the world is terribly complex is now a vital part of global cultural experience, 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 worlds complex problems requires the recognition of complexity, not for complexitys 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?

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest?

The field of cultural diplomacy, which looms large in present-day cultural policy and discourse, has been insufficiently analysed by the cultural disciplines. This special issue engages with the task of filling the gap. The present essay sets out the terms in which the authors have taken up this engagement, focusing principally on Australia and Asia. Distinguishing between cultural diplomacy that is essentially interest-driven governmental practice and cultural relations, which is 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.

Television Fictions around the World: Melodrama and Irony in Global Perspective:

O livro Watching Dallas, publicado na decada de 1980 estuda as discussoes sobre a recepcao da novela norte-americana Dallas. Decadas depois, parece adequado olhar para esses anos que separam o lancamento do livro e o momento atual e pensar sobre o que mudou na cultura televisiva, especialmente no que se refere a serie televisiva dramatica. A ironia com que os telespectadores veem as novelas desde entao nos Estados Unidos e alguns melodramas produzidos e veiculados na Asia sao alguns dos pontos analisados.

The predicament of diversity: Multiculturalism in practice at the art museum

Mainstream cultural institutions such as museums are increasingly called upon to increase their accessibility to culturally diverse communities and audiences, including migrant groups who do not generally visit museums. This essay discusses the challenges experienced by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the largest art museum in Sydney, Australia, in mounting an exhibition of Buddhist art in 2001, and in its efforts to use the exhibition as a vehicle for drawing new audiences in, especially Asian Buddhist groups. The case study raises important questions about possibilities and limits of engaging cultural diversity in the art museum. The biases inherent in the operations of the art museum, especially its non-negotiable reliance on a Western concept of ‘art’, are at the heart of the predicament of diversity for art museum practice.

Beyond Chinese groupism: Chinese Australians between assimilation, multiculturalism and diaspora

This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is not 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.

A cultural studies without guarantees: Response to Kuan-Hsing Chen

Abstract This article is a short response to Chens critique of our article ‘Asianing Australia: notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies’. It is argued that Chens attack on our article is misdirected. Furthermore, we are in substantial agreement with Chen on many issues, most importantly that the nation-state should not be the uninterrogated site for the development of a ‘local’ cultural studies. However, we find Chens politics, and his use of a reductionist Marxist theory, overly simplistic. Moreover, the core/periphery binary which he uses is not adequate to express the complexities of a global capitalist world order in which the sites of power are becoming increasingly decentred. Similarly, the politics of resistance are also more complex than Chen suggests; resistance must be understood in relation to local situations and local tactics, as well as the imperatives of global capitalism. Finally, a properly localized and left-politicized cultural studies must reflexively interrogat...

Guest editorial The predicament of difference

Speaking in 1989 on the relentless march of economic and cultural globalization, Stuart Hall noted its paradoxically multinational and de-centred character that issues a homogenizing, ‘westernizing’ logic and a fascination with proliferating difference as exotic, novel, and so on. This apparent contradiction or inconsistency is nothing of the sort: it testifies to the current historical and political conjuncture as a moment in the transformation of capital into mobile forms of power stretching across the entirety of human and social life; from financial markets to the free enterprise culture, from on-demand production to niche consumption, from the cornucopia of personal choices to the advent of ‘lifestyle’. Most interestingly for Hall, this malleable front characterizes the effectiveness and Achilles heel of the hegemonic project given ‘the fact that, at a certain point, globalization cannot proceed without learning to live with and work through difference’ (1991a: 31, emphasis added). The injunction to ‘live and work with difference’ is not, however, the sole prerogative of the globalization of capital and culture but also poses salient questions of the local and its protean subjects. In the midst of the continual human traffic and restless ideational flows evinced within the ‘ethnoscapes’ of the ‘disjunctive’ global cultural economy, the relative stabilities of filial, communal, and recreational associations are, as Arjun Appadurai informs us, ‘everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion . . . these moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to’ (1990: 297). This points to a necessary acceptance and understanding of difference in a more profound sense, where the effective distinction between established normative groupings such as cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities is thoroughly disturbed. Thus the various intersections within increasingly complex social identities emphasize difference E D I T O R I A L

Ethnicities and our precarious future

Ethnicities was launched in 2001, the year of what came to be popularly called 9/11 – the fateful terrorist attacks on the USA, especially New York City. In retrospect, this event, equally spectacular and unanticipated as it was and happening so early in the new century, turned out to be a watershed moment in the course of global modernity. Both historically and symbolically, we can look back at this event as the harbinger of a testing, turbulent and indeterminate future for human society. When the editors of Ethnicities asked me 10 years ago to write up my response to 9/11, I made the observation that what this event highlighted was ‘the intractability of one of the most difficult questions of our time: how are we to live together in a globalized world?’ (Ethnicities, 2002: 160). Today, I feel that this question has not only remained as difficult to address as ever, but that its intractability has only become exponentially greater. This intractability is reflected in the persistent salience, even proliferation of ‘ethnicities’ – in the plural rather than the singular ‘ethnicity’ – in the globalized, mobile and interconnected world we live in today. The continuing power of ethnic identities and divides in global modernity shows how the cherished idea of one humanity is constantly being undercut by the historical reality that the human race (and human civilization) continues to constitute itself as an assemblage of multiple, mutually exclusive peoples. This, of course, has been a key contradiction haunting the governance of modern societies: the need to square human equality with human difference. The slogan ‘unity in diversity’ is perhaps the most well-known, and overused, trope to cement this intrinsic contradiction into a seemingly balanced compromise. But the emptiness of this slogan, its discursive incapacity to operate as a solution to very real social and political divides and conflicts, has been more than demonstrated in the aftermath of 9/11, both at the national and at the global level. As a consequence, our current notions of ethnicity, identity, community, nationality, and so on are now all up for grabs, and our ideas about what makes a society – what its boundaries are, who belongs to it and how it is held together – are thoroughly unsettled, even though established

At home in Asia? : Sydney's Chinatown and Australia's 'Asian century'

It is widely recognised that the 21st century is seeing a geopolitical shift in global power 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.