ABSTRACT
I start this Introduction with an anecdote that I hope conveys the kinds of crosscurrents that feed contemporary Asian Australian studies. In October 2005, I was invited to an American Studies conference in Siegen, Germany. The theme of this conference, which was convened by Mita Banerjee and Pia Wiegmink, was ‘denationalizing North American studies’. I was approached on the basis of my profile in Asian Australian studies. More relevantly for this conference, my paper addressed the ways in which North American scholarship informed and/or inflected the growing field of Asian Australian studies, and it also examined the consequences of this intellectual traffic in theories of racialisation.
