ABSTRACT
Separated by the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Australia and the United States have histories with some prominent common features. Both white settler societies that enacted white supremacist postcolonial regimes and whose indigenous peoples suffered physical and cultural decimation, they are also countries of immigrants with recurring nativist manifestations. Though their numbers in neither country have ever been substantial, Asians provided critical labour for extractive and agricultural economies and helped open up commerce in frontier regions. They were then targeted for exclusion when they were deemed inherently inassimilable to whiteness, and later invited back into the national fold under the banner of multiculturalism. Australia and the US have both reinvented themselves in the modern era as cosmopolitan and democratic nations that celebrate differences, where racism is imagined as largely a thing of the past. Thus, Asians in both countries—now representing a diversity of national origins—are exalted as successful immigrants and model minorities, and their countries of origin are sought after as trading partners in this new age of globalisation. It is no surprise, then, that Asians in America and Asians in Australia have become objects of serious academic study. For more than thirty years, Asian American Studies has developed, flourished and gained legitimacy in the US academy. It is fully institutionalised in the form of programs and, most importantly, departments with degree-granting prerogatives and dedicated faculty of their own, 1 two academic journals published by prestigious university presses, 2 and an annual professional meeting that routinely draws participants in the mid-hundreds or higher when held in demographically dense locations such as Los Angeles. From their birth in the cauldron of the Civil Rights movement and early framing in cultural nationalist terms, Black Studies, Chicano Studies, American Indian Studies and Asian American Studies have all moved well beyond tendencies towards contributionist and identity politics perspectives to become critical race studies grounded in racial formation theories and intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. More recently, they have become increasingly occupied with high theory and cultural critique, and taken serious turns towards incorporating diasporic, transnational, and globalisation frameworks. 3
