Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing: Introduction

When did 'Asian Australian writing' come into existence? Answering this question is almost as difficult as deciding when people from the regions now known as Asia first arrived in Australia. We know, for example, that Chinese settlers filed petitions protesting their treatment by colonial governments as early as 1855 (Broinowski 11), and that autobiographical writing appeared in the 1920s (Shen 2001). Creative writers started publishing in the 1950s (Mena Abdullah), 60s (Chitra Fernando) and 70s (Ee Tiang Hong, Brian Castro) - and when we know more about publications in languages other than English, these dates are likely to be pushed back further.1 However, as a category of writing, Asian Australian writing did not emerge until the 1990s, and its currency within literary scholarship dates back not much more than a decade2, following in the footsteps of 'Asian American writing', which had developed as a successful and influential field of literary and critical production since the 1980s (see articles by Dorothy Wang and Mridula Chakraborty in this volume).The recent and rapid blossoming of Asian Australian creative writing should come as no surprise. Australia's Asian population remained small until the White Australia policy was finally abandoned in the 1970s, but has grown rapidly since the first influx of refugees from post-war Vietnam. Asian Australians on average have a higher level of education than the Australian population as a whole (Australia in the Asian Century 101), and while many first-generation migrants, especially those from Vietnam and mainland China, arrived with little English, migrants from countries like India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Malaysia often had native or near-native English proficiency. For the second and '1.5' generations of migrants3 who are currently coming onto the scene, language and education present no barrier, and (perhaps) inspired by an 'Asian boom' in diasporic cultural production across the globe, they have enthusiastically turned to writing as well as other art forms (film, visual arts), in many cases with considerable success.At the same time, the growing academic interest in diasporic writing world-wide has been embraced by Australian scholars, and scholars of Australian literature in other locations, to the extent that Asian Australian writing is now a lively and diverse field of literary scholarship, and one that is developing its own critical and theoretical debates surrounding terminology, legitimacy, taxonomies, and, frequently, the place of this writing within national literary traditions such as that of Australian literature.Yet, for all the critical and creative energy it has released, Asian Australian writing remains a contested category, as does the related category of multicultural writing. What exactly do we mean by 'Asia', and to what extent does the term gloss over and neutralise the huge differences (cultural, linguistic, historical) between writers from separate parts of this vast continent and their diverse heritage? Does the label further marginalise texts and writers who may already have encountered discrimination and cultural stereotyping in Australia? Does it draw attention away from the writing itself to focus primarily on the identity of the writer? Conversely, if such questions tend to expose the negative potential inherent in critical categorisation, one must also ask what alternatives are available if we want to discuss literatures that do not fit neatly into the national categories which have been the dominant system of literary classification to date, but which are coming under increasing pressure.'Diasporic writing', 'world literature', 'transnational' or 'transcultural' literatures: these are only some of the more recent concepts mobilised to account for the growing realisation that writing does not stop at national or linguistic borders, but spills across nations, cultures and languages in today's ever more globalised cultural economy - moreover, that it always did. …