Unsettling the Settlements: decolonising narratives of mobility, identity, and Eurasian (be)longing, in and against the settler-colonial archive (online)

This project* traces the intersecting racial-colonial logics of ‘mixed-race’ migration policy and Eurasian (Serani) desires for mobility and belonging through archival records and narratives of post-Merdeka migration from the former ‘Straits Settlement’ of Penang, Malaysia, to settler-colonial Australia. At a time when the assimilatory logic of hybridity or mixed-raceness was used as a tool of colonial governance to justify the Stolen Generations, Australia’s ‘mixed-descent’ migration policy simultaneously allowed non-white ‘British Subjects’ a pathway to settlement.

I engage with scholarship on Eurasian-Australian identity, place and belonging (e.g. Choo, 2004, 2007; Choo et al., 2004; Jolly, 2017; Walker, 2012) and intimate encounters with colonial archives (Stoler, 2002), and situates this in conversation with postcolonial feminist and cultural studies scholarship to think through the ambivalent location of Eurasians—sometimes also referred to as Serani—in relation to Australia’s multiple formations of whiteness (Ahmed, 1999; Ang, 2001; Choo et al., 2004; Ganguly, 2007; Perera, 2005). How did Eurasian migrants ‘pass’ (or not pass) through hybridity (Ahmed, 2015) to navigate their acceptance into a ‘white post-colonising society’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) via institutions of racialised governance? How did they make sense of themselves and their place across shifting— and sometimes fraught—familial, embodied, institutional, and transnational histories? Reflecting on official migration records of members of my own Eurasian family, and the extended Eurasian diaspora, I listen for 'colonial common sense’ (Stoler, 2010) - to the chromatic and sonic logics of race and whiteness - to attend to the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences of what it means to positioned as both ‘on the edge and in between’ (Choo, 1998).

References:

Ahmed, S. (1999). ‘Home and Away: Narratives of migration and estrangement’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2(3): 329-347.

Ahmed, S. (2015). "Some Striking Feature: Whiteness and Institutional Passing." Feminist Killjoys (blog) https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/06/14/some-striking-feature-whiteness-and-institutional-passing/.

Ang, I. (2001). “On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity”. In On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. London and New York, Routledge.

Choo, C. (1998). "On the edge and in between: The experience of an Asian-Australian historian." The Oral History Association of Australia Journal, (20): 34-40.

Choo, C., A. Carrier, C. Choo and S. Choo (2004). "Being Eurasian: transculturality or transcultural reality?" Life Writing: 71.

Curthoys, A. (2000). An Uneasy Conversation: the multicultural and the Indigenous. In Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. UNSW Press.

Ganguly, D. (2007). "From Empire to Empire? Writing the transnational Anglo-Indian self in Australia." Journal of intercultural studies 28(1): 27-40.

Jolly, I. M. (2017). Identity, Community and Place The Post-World War II Eurasian Exodus from Malaysia and Singapore. Unpublished PhD thesis, Charles Darwin University.

Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The White Possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Univeristy of Minnesota Press.

Perera, S. (2005). "‘Who will I Become? The Multiple Formations of Australian Whiteness." Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 1: 30-39.

Stoler, A. L. (2002). "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance." Archival Science 2(1-2): 87-109.

Stoler, A. L. (2010). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.

Walker, K. (2012). "Intimate Interactions: Eurasian family histories in colonial Penang." Modern Asian Studies 46(2): 303-329.

*I received a small amount of funding through the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research to begin this research project in 2022. I presented some of my initial thinking on this work at the 2022 CSAA Conference (you can view my presentation below). The project has stalled, with other employment and focus, but it is a love project that I will continue to work on and publish on in the future.