AsianCrit and Autoethnography: A Future-Focussed Fugue of Critical Collaborative Inquiry

Abstract

Despite the considerable influence of the “Asian Century” on Australian Government policy and the purported centrality of Asia to Australian national identity, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously highlighted and intensified the deleterious impacts of anti-Asian racism. Specifically, Orientalist discourses and a “fear of invasion” that underpin the differential racialized treatment of the Asian diaspora in Australia have manifested in both old and new racisms that have had significant impacts on the mental and physical wellbeing of Asian Australians. In response to this crisis, this autoethnographic paper acknowledges the growing methodological complexity of Critical Race Theory and advances a novel, future-focussed Asian Australian social justice agenda in solidarity with other racialized minorities by interrogating the collaborative potential of Asian Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit) and Autoethnography through an investigation of their respective theoretical and methodological intersections.