I will be presenting a paper, based on my new research project, Unsettling the Settlements, at the 2022 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) conference: bodies in flux to be held in Perth in June.
Unsettling the Settlements: decolonising narratives of mobility, identity, and Eurasian (be)longing, in and against the settler-colonial archive
Images of the author’s Eurasian mother and aunt (circa 1961/65), from immigration records held at the National Archives of Australia. (NAA: J25, 1965/12307; NAA: J25, 1973/2003)
Abstract: This paper 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 Settlements’ (Penang, Malacca, Singapore), to settler-colonial Australia. Eurasians are a distinct community group and historical minority in Malaysia and Singapore formed from ‘descendants of relationships between local inhabitants of Southeast Asia and European colonisers’ (Choo et al., 2004, 71). Changes to Australia’s ‘mixed-descent’ migration policy in the 1960s allowed for the migration of more people from nonwhite backgrounds, including historic Eurasian communities from Malaysia and Singapore who were previously excluded. However, immigration officials found the policy ‘consistently difficult to administer’ and the question of Eurasian applicants’ ‘racial origins’ was a fraught one (National Archives of Australia: A446, 1970/95021).
At a time when the logic of hybridity or mixed-raceness was used as a tool of racialised governance to justify the violent forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families (Stolen Generations), Australia’s ‘mixed-descent’ migration policy simultaneously allowed non-white British Subjects from the southeast Asian archipelago a pathway to settlement. This project aims to think through these entangled histories and legacies, to unsettle the settlements.
Drawing on critical media and cultural studies, critical race, and post-colonial theory (Ahmed, 1999; Ang, 2001; Choo et al., 2004; Hage; 1998; Ganguly, 2007), I think through the ambivalent location of Eurasians in relation to Australia’s ‘multiple formations of whiteness’ (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? What were the shifting racial logics through which prospective Eurasian migrants were evaluated and framed (textually, visually, and sonically) in government archives? 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 and case files of members of the migrant Eurasian diaspora (including my own family), and listening to the ‘colonial common sense’ in these archives (Stoler, 2009), I think through 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.
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.
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/.
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.
Ganguly, D. (2007). "From Empire to Empire? Writing the transnational Anglo-Indian self in Australia." Journal of Intercultural studies 28(1): 27-40.
Hage, D. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Annandale: Pluto Press.
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. (2010). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.