Asia Institute - Theses
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ItemChinese Language Use by School-aged Chinese Australians: From a Dual-track Culturalisation Perspective( 2020)Over the past decades, the topic of Chinese immigrants has attracted wide attention and increasing academic interest, due to the rapid growth of Chinese immigration across the globe. However, many existing viewpoints are mainstream-centric, homogeneous and dated. To overcome the current research problems and elaborate Chinese immigrants’ culturalisation process through one important factor—language use—this research takes school-aged Chinese Australians as a case study, analysing their use of Chinese language from a dual-track culturalisation perspective. The 2016 Australian Census reveals that over 1.2 million people in the country claim their Chinese ancestry (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018). Among them, people who regard Mandarin and Cantonese as the most preferred language to speak at home are 46% and 22% respectively, which jointly contributes to the prevalence of Chinese language use in the Chinese community in Australia. This drew our attention to why and how school-aged Chinese Australians learn and use Chinese language and how its use influences the construction and reconfiguration of their ethnic and cultural identity. Drawing upon interviews and participant observation, this study addresses the research questions above by presenting the complex decision-making process of Chinese immigrant families and the dynamic relations between the broad cultural environment at macro level, the Chinese community in Australia and Chinese families at micro level, and school-aged Chinese Australians themselves. The findings of this research project contribute to our understanding of international migrant children’s culturalisation process, through their language use and multidimensional identity negotiation, and highlight school-aged Chinese Australians’ agency in the transformation of the immigrant community in Australia via their dual-track language practices. Though research findings in this study are based on the case of Chinese-Australian children and adolescents, many aspects of their experience could be shared by immigrants in other age groups and of other ethnicities, due to the representativeness of Chinese immigrants as one of the largest immigrant groups and Australia as a typical immigrant country.
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ItemOverseas Chinese Communities in Transition: Capable Agency, Translocal Positioning, and Community Re-organisation( 2019)The rapid growth of China-born immigrants around the world has attracted intense attention from researchers, the public, and policymakers. However, much understanding of this population is clouded by speculation and misinformation, thus resulting in heated debates and even social anxieties. This research seeks to inform these debates concerning overseas Chinese communities by presenting an empirical case study conducted in Victoria, Australia. It argues that the significant influx of China-born immigrants since the late 1980s and early 1990s has seen an ongoing community reorganising process. Although this process has been influenced by convoluted forces at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, the thesis demonstrates that it is more endogenous than exogenous. In other words, the process is fundamentally driven by Chinese immigrants who have strong inclinations and capabilities to self-organise for personal advancement and collective betterment. This research is grounded in offline and online ethnographic fieldwork spanning over three years. It is also informed by Chinese and Australian government reports, Australian national censuses, archival resources generated by the local Chinese community, as well as historical and cross-sectional comparisons. The five discussion chapters of this thesis identify and elaborate on the following key manifestations of the reorganising process respectively: a parallel rise of (1) homeland-engaging (transnational) and (2) hostland-embedding (local) activism, (3) heightened community engagement activism, (4) a feminisation turn, and (5) a redrawn organisational landscape. Addressed in this thesis is an under-researched and under-theorised topic central to the study of Chinese Overseas. This research also problematises state-centric analysis and demonstrates how a community-focused perspective can effectively illustrate and account for the dynamism and mechanism of immigrant community development. The co-evolutionary model developed in this research has proved constructive to unpack these convoluted and dynamic processes. In addition, this perspective also sheds light on the lived experiences of transnational mobility, the promises and pitfalls of accelerated transnational migration, and changes unleashed by accelerating globalisation. In so doing, it offers new avenues to studies on international migration and globalisation.
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ItemNature and the garden: ideas of nature and the Japanese gardens designed in Australia by Nakajima Ken and Nakane Shirō( 2003)This thesis discusses the connection between ideas of Nature and Japanese gardens, especially those designed by Nakajima Ken and Nakane Shiro in Australia. First, it establishes the problematic status of the European idea of Nature in the discussion of Japanese gardens by analysing garden related texts from the late Heian, Kamakura, Momoyama and Edo periods. In this section indigenous Japanese ideas, which were partly congruent with the European idea of Nature, are linked with the development of traditional Japanese garden design. Next, the thesis traces the intrusion of the Romantic idea of Nature into the discussion of Japanese gardens during the 19th and 20th centuries, when the theory that Japanese people enjoy a special connection with Nature became part of Nihonjinron arguments about the unique characteristics of the Japanese. The thesis argues that there remain some peculiarly Japanese elements in thinking about Nature and the garden: Nature has a human scale, since the focus has always been on the designer’s perception, traces of human activity are happily accommodated, and it still refers to certain parts of China and Japan rather than the whole world. While non-Japanese Romantic concepts, such as that of "the wild" might complicate the analysis of gardens which are composed in a conventional way, the thesis argues that the Japanese gardens at Cowra and the Melbourne Zoo demonstrate how important the potent, poetic Romantic idea of Nature is in the design and discussion of contemporary Japanese gardens. Since the 19th century, Romantic literary ideas about the role of emotion and imagination in the relationship of human beings with Nature can be found, along with literary terms such as “symbolize” and "express", in Japanese writing about gardens. An analysis of the two gardens in Australia, based on frequent visits, interviews with the designers and a study of their writing, argues that the Japanese version of the Romantic idea of Nature has in fact revitalized Japanese garden design.
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ItemThe cross-cultural representation of the exotic: the Japanese restaurant in contemporary Australia( 2011)This thesis examines the cross-cultural representation of the ‘exotic’ as a new mode of ‘Japaneseness’ emerging through increasing cross-cultural exchanges and interactions since the late twentieth century. Based upon ethnographic data and fieldwork, it demonstrates how the exotic is produced, distributed and consumed via food as a particular cultural product and practice within so-called ‘Japanese restaurant’ in contemporary Australia. This thesis analyses the Japanese restaurant in Melbourne as an ‘exotic genre’, and how Japaneseness (or ethnic identity in general) becomes a necessary formula of the genre. In this research, I explore the changing meanings of what it means to be exotic and what is represented as Japaneseness. The study argues that Japaneseness is reconfigured through contact with other forms, such as ‘whiteness’ and ‘Asianness’, within popular commodity culture. It also suggests that this mode of representation can be distinguished from earlier formations of exoticism that locate a subject monolithically within narrow stereotypes, although the old exoticism has not entirely disappeared in cultural politics. Instead of viewing the Japanese restaurant as a cohesive category, I also conceive of it as a cross-culturally implicated formation that challenges a fixed representation of Japaneseness constructed from a single point of view. My thesis is structured as follows. Chapters 1 and 2 set theoretical foundations for discussions on the cross-cultural representation of the exotic, focusing upon food as a particular cultural product and practice. In the part of this literature review, I demonstrate how food and related practices are marked by power, as well as by pleasure, as they move between spatial/national, temporal and ontological boundaries. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 interrogate this cultural phenomenon, specifically in the context of the production and consumption of Japanese food in Melbourne, through an analysis of my interviews with providers (restaurateurs, chefs, wait staff and wholesalers) and consumers and restaurant observations. The part of this ethnographic study concerns issues regarding cross-cultural desire (Chapters 3 and 4), translation (Chapter 5) and ethnicity (Chapter 6) within exoticism to argue that Japaneseness can become marketable in a cross-cultural context for an exotic image that is both ‘close’ and ‘different’.