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-state's 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 products of the European colonizing/modernizing project. The paper then moves on to critique the privileged status of the nation, not only in the official international order but also in cultural studies. A critical transnationalist cultural studies must take the centrality of the nation-state in the modern world system seriously, though not for granted. The nation-state is put within a transnational frame by highlighting its complex and contradictory role within the fluid and dynamic forces of global capitalism. It is these forces which inform the current conflictual rapprochement of ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’. However, this — desired and contested — rapprochement cannot be understood without its proper contextualization within and against the background of the divergent (post)colonial histories of both ‘Australia’ (as a white-settler colony) and ‘Asia’. This illuminates the necessity of addressing the intersections between cultural studies and postcolonial theory in developing a critical transnationalism.

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