This event is a prequel to the Asian Australian Identities 7 conference: Genealogies of Identity Politics https://aai7conference.home.blog/
This panel explores the implications of sharing space, sharing words, sharing positions, in an increasingly divided and divisive world where the politics of emancipation and an old-fashioned belief in a ‘better world’ have been jettisoned to the forces of the market, fear and violence. At a time when the multifarious populations of the globe have been more connected than ever, and we find that labels connect as much as alienate, this panel attempts to understand how we can share, and perhaps, try to shape yet again, a common humanity.
On Sharing Space
The Easterday attacks on their island nation cast each of Sri Lanka's multi-ethnic communities as potential perpetrators or victims. In the twenty-four hour interregnum, while casualty numbers mounted, a bewildered Australian-Lankan diaspora speculated on their respective levels of culpability. Were they targeting religion, ethnicity or class; were they local or global terrorists; who stood to gain from these heinous acts? Their confusion appeared as a residual measure of the wartime cultivation of disunity. This paper uses the trope of space to examine how hyphenated communities negotiate ethnicity, religion and sovereignty in times crisis, questioning the divisive structures that undergird them. It asks what is at stake in creating or managing identitarian boundaries. Its approach from architecture refers this analysis to the physical environments associated with minority habitation and seeks an understanding of the value of sharing space.
Prof Anoma Pieris
Melbourne School of Design
The University of Melbourne
On Sharing Terms
“When people raise the term identity politics, the modern or the latest version of the race card, it is raised with the intention of marginalising the issue or shutting you up.”
Senator Kamala Harris, 29 April 2019.
I am a literary scholar. Like many Asians who have navigated multiple languages from an early age, terms and terminologies have been a critical means of travelling through mixed spaces and contexts in our countries of origins. Coming to English as a colonial/colonising/global language, and at the same time, a language that is incredibly promiscuous and adaptive, has been a source of joy and creativity. It has allowed for a particular kind of postcolonial class formation with access to professional and international mobility, while underscoring the tremendous responsibility that comes with such freedoms. Discovering Raymond William's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society was the start of a romance with academia for me, and many like me, a romance that then extended to a prolonged, lifelong dalliance with the Western epistemological apparatus and Enlightenment discourse of Humanism. 1990 marks the end of hope in such a shared vocabulary: the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, post 9/11 developments, the Tampa affair, Cronulla, and now Christchurch, have all marked a schism in this vocabulary that has been infamously termed the clash of civilisations by Samuel Huntington. This paper attempts a genealogy of one particular term, identity politics, that no longer carries its erstwhile emancipatory charge in a world that is rapidly divided between invested incommensurabilities, of entrenched positions, that can no longer even agree to what constitutes place, power and privilege. It does so from the position of a hyphenated Asian identity construction.
Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty
Faculty of Arts
Monash University