Locating Asian Australian Studies

Abstract

This article seeks to address the issues involved in the mapping of Asian Australian Studies that has been occurring over the last decade or so. It deals with the central formative texts that have sought to conceptualise the field as it emerged, and it discusses the parameters inside which Asian Australian Studies seeks to define itself. The article investigates the difficulties, which navigating the plurality of discourses concerning the diasporic, transnational and cross-cultural necessarily entails. Its central argument is that scholars working in Asian Australian Studies tread a very careful path through the many theoretical fields which have inspired its academic ‘performers’, as well as between a minority based discourse and the dominant discourses of the majority society, which it disrupts. These majority discourses primarily take the form of an already settled national identity formation, which may or may not accommodate ‘new’ minority discourses, but what is often missed in analytical approaches is the fact that favouring more inclusive national discourses over more exclusionist forms, does not in itself constitute a platform for challenging the ‘natural’ predominance of certain representational forms.