School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemGoing south( 2000)This article examines the relationship between transnational news and narrowcasting in the diasporic Chinese consumption of media in Australia. In our analysis, ‘going south’ was the paradigm we developed to disrupt the fixity of the Asia/Australia binary, to foreground relationality and flow, to examine the landscape of encounters that were produced at the intersections of these places. Going south, then, functions as a critical trajectory as well as a geographical distinction. For the transnational Chinese diaspora in Australia, the status of ‘going south’ is a metaphor inflected with shifting meanings. Inscribed in a migratory movement of literal displacement and reoriented in the racialised landscape of a postcolonial settler Australia, it aligns itself with south of Asia, south of China and south of the East and the West. This trajectory locates the emerging identity of a transnational Chinese-Australia in a spatial-temporal mobility. It also articulates itself as a place of cultural negotiation, a very distinctive borderland. In this article, going south means a recognition of the specific media landscapes in Australia and their various relations with diasporic audiences. It also means an analysis attentive to the ways in which the reception of Chinese audio visual products is mediated by different experiences of diaspora and the different institutional, economic and policy dynamics that structure news programming in Cantonese and Mandarin. We argue that narrowcasting is more than a site where other news becomes available; it is also a site where other temporal-spatial relations decentre the identity of nation as narration, making going south a space where Chinese identities foreground Australia’s multiple enunciatory presents.
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ItemWhat’s So Queer About Happy Together? a.k.a. Queer(N)Asian: Interface, Community, Belonging( 2000)This paper attends to the relationship between diasporic media and diasporic queer formation by exploring the cultural circuit of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997)as an agent of diasporic Asian Australian queer visibility. In particular, it examines how Happy Together interpellates Hong Kong’s ®rst modern Cantopop star, actor and Asian gay icon Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing,4 as an interface for articulating an emerging diasporic Asian queer identity. This interface is a transnational imagination called `Queer (N)Asian’.5 `Queer (N)Asian’ expresses how diasporic media interpellates diasporic queer formations.Queer (N)Asian is constituted in the disjunctive new `scapes’ informed by Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) global cultural flow. Characterized by three features, it is anemergent horizon that critically deploys the instabilities of `queer’ and `Asian’. The first feature is that it contests the orthodoxy of East and West. Hong Kong cinemabetween the transitional years, 1984-1997, highlighted this contestation as a globally popular and postnational screen for diasporic interpellation. During this period, thepost-Declaration cinema expressed the identity-crisis experienced by the colony. In The East is Red (Ching Siu-tung 1993) for example, the transsexual martial artist, aptly named `Asia The Invincible’, exemplifies the deployment of `transsexuality’ and `Asia’ to highlight the cinema as a cultural model that experienced both British and Chinese modernities, combining and reconfiguring the contingencies and contiguities of West/East, capitalism/communism, and pluralism/autocracy. The consumption of Hong Kong cinema as a travelling technology in the queer Asian-Australian diaspora, for example, has produced a new self-conscious Asian and queer visibility constituted in such a tactical deployment.