Diaspora In Australia Research Articles

Liberalism Repatriated: Prospects of an Anthropology of Antiracism

The recent crisis over laicite in French public institutions is part of a larger dilemma faced by the liberal nations of Europe struggling in concert to forge a supranational polity, while safeguarding their autochthonous notions of tolerance and universalism. Despite the modular appeal of liberal ideals such as free markets and secular governance, the implementation of these in all corners still manages to evoke Western Europe as the birthplace of this tradition and the space in which it has putatively been correctly in practice. Witness, for example, the myriad civil society organizations that have intervened in ethnic conflict situations around the world and make Western Europe their bureaucratic home. For immigrants who find themselves arriving and establishing new lives in this civil Europe, the situation on the ground may controvert the ideals that have been exported and continue to be exported abroad. In France recent events challenge the malleability of liberalism by presenting it with a greater diversity of cultural symbols and communal affinities. If one response has been a law to ban religious signs from public institutions, another has been the efflorescence of civil and human rights organizations entrenched in a fight against racism and xenophobia. In the spirit of ethnographic inquiry into states and state power, an anthropology of Antiracism captures the tense repatriation of liberal ideals carried out with increasing tenacity by migrants in the European Union. The French law enforcing laicite results from a decade-long debate over the meaning of the hijab and its relationship to both the Catholic and Jewish communities of France. It also reflects concern over the growing population of muslims which now surpasses 5 million and places Islam second behind Catholicism in number of followers. But the law also comes at a time when Western countries wish to draw a hard line between tolerating difference and encouraging divergence; the law thus represents a more global crisis over humanity and its others. Humanity as an idea is defined through shared value concepts. It includes all those who believe in well established goods such as freedom and sovereignty. In the post- revolutionary United States, as in most self-fashioning nation-states, these values were embedded in institutions. What set the country apart, however, was the effort to reconcile institutionalized values with real deviations, heterogeneity, hybridity, and polyglossia, presented by the variety of cultural idioms brought by immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, and to a lesser degree Latin America and Asia. That is, the nascent United States had to combine mechanisms to institutionalize values at the highest level (albeit nominally bracketing religiosity) in tandem with mechanisms to incorporate challenges to those values through rational judgment. These formed the two sides of the multicultural national project. In her reflection on the liberal diaspora in Australia, Povinelli (2002) labels these two sides and rational knowledge. Accordingly, moral sensibility is that kind of that refers always to something beyond discourse (2002: 9). It makes an appeal to some tacit, pre-theoretical way of thinking. Meanwhile, rational knowledge is that kind of that is able to reflect on itself. It is able to appraise its legitimacy according to some standards of rationality (2002: 9). It is useful here to reiterate an observation Povinelli makes all too subtly. The goal of critical rational is to not simply to allow routinized procedures to deliver a just conclusion; it is also to reinforce the value concepts that underly its assumptions. So although value judgments are made separate from that which is considered rational knowledge, the separation between the two fields is not a logical impasse but the result of great labor to evacuate the appearance of morality from the realm of rationality. …

‘Aspirational’ Chinese: Achieving Community Prominence on Thursday Island, Northeast Australia

The experience of the Chinese diaspora in Australia has been the subject of much academic attention in the past three decades. The prevailing narrative of the Chinese presence, which dates from early White occupation of Australia, has highlighted discourses of marginalization and exclusion for the Chinese pioneers who contributed so significantly to the economic development of the nation. Yet, despite their economic success, few Chinese gained regard and standing in mainstream colonial society and, of these, the best known resided in southern cities. Across northern Australia, far from the major population centers and seats of government, Chinese also became economically successful as agriculturists and merchants. Again, only a handful sought and obtained wider community acceptance, even local prominence. Our study draws on the diasporic experience of Chinese on Thursday Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to elucidate strategies employed by a minority to achieve social status within the general community. Through exploration of the socio-cultural forces influencing their choices — the dominant ethos of Thursday Island, multi-ethnicity and the consequences of anti-Chinese legislation — a unique portrait of the Chinese diasporic experience emerges, narrated through multiple sites of cultural collusion and contestation.

Chinese entrepreneurs

Recounts the history of the Chinese Diaspora in Australia, which dates back to the Gold Rush of the 1850s. In the past three decades, following the end of the white Australia policy, many ethnic Chinese immigrants have immigrated to Australia. Although there are only 300,000 people of Chinese ancestry living in Australia, Chinese immigration is a critical chapter of Australia’s immigration experience. Chinese entrepreneurs have played a major role in the history of the Chinese in Australia. Explores the experience of Chinese entrepreneurs in Australia from the earliest days till the present and reviews historical accounts of Chinese entrepreneurs in Australia, before presenting the results of recent research. Argues that it is necessary to investigate how ethnicity, gender and class have intersected to shape changing patterns of Chinese entrepreneurship in the Australian Chinese Diaspora. Suggests also that the dynamics of Chinese immigration and Chinese entrepreneurship in Australia have been shaped by the changing dynamics of globalisation, the state and the racialisation of Chinese immigrants in the Australian labour market and society as a whole.

Asian Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia

Asian Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia

The Identity of the Chinese in Australian History

Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

Speaking of the Hindu Diaspora in Australia

What are the distinctive characteristics of the "Diaspora Hindus" who turned up during the different phases in the Australian landscape? To address this question, this essay will briefly discuss the early, colonial, post-independent, and more recent phases corresponding to patterns in migration, settlement, and temple culture of Australian Hindus, drawing on the history of their reception in the host society alongside other data, from the 1857 to 1996 national censuses.

Video and the diasporic imagination of selfhood: A case study of the croatians in Australia

Abstract This article is concerned with the role and effects of video on cultural technology in the Croatian diaspora in Australia in the light of the war in former Yugoslavia. It reveals the fragility of the cultural boundaries both of Australian multiculturalism and of the emerging postmodern culture of hybridity, which favour symbolic ethnicity as a form of ethnic identity. It also traces the gradual and often nervous formation and reinvention of Croatian cultural (diasporic) identity which has, with the inception of war, turned into fully fledged diasporic nationalism.

Making Meaning of Historical Papua New Guinea Recordings

PARADISEC’s PNG collections represent the great diversity in the regions and languages of PNG. In 2016 and 2017, in recognition of the value of PARADISEC’s collections, ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) provided funding for us to concentrate efforts on enhancing the metadata that describes our Papua New Guinea (PNG) collections, an effort designed to maximise the findability and useability of the language and music recordings preserved in the archive for both source communities and researchers. PARADISEC's subsequent engagement with PNG language experts has led to collaborations with members of speaker communities who are part of the PNG diaspora in Australia. In this paper, we show that making historical recordings more findable, accessible and better described can result in meaningful interactions with and responses to the data in source communities. The effects of empowering speaker communities in their relationships to archives can be far reaching – even inverting, or disrupting the power relationships that have resulted from the colonial histories in which archives are embedded.