Exoticism or Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Difference and Desire in Chinese Australian Women's Writing

ABSTRACT

In Visceral Cosmopolitanism, Mica Nava posits a positive and, by her own admission, utopian alternative to postcolonial readings of the sexualisation of difference: a cosmopolitanism located with the antiracist ‘micro-narratives and encounters of the emotional, gendered and domestic everyday’ (2007: 14). Olivia Khoo, in The Chinese Exotic, defines a new, diasporic Chineseness which ‘conceives of women and femininity, not as the oppressed, but as forming part of the new visibility of Asia’ (2007: 12). My reading of recent fiction by Chinese Australian women writers proposes to test these theories against more established models for understanding East/West intimate encounters such as exoticism, Orientalism and Occidentalism, speculating that they may offer a more nuanced understanding of both the complexity and the normalisation of difference in the affective cultures of the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Visceral cosmopolitanism
• everyday cosmopolitanism
• Chinese exoticism
• orientalism
• diasporic Chinese identities
• the sexualisation of difference

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, the University of Wollongong and the University of British Columbia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Wenche Ommundsen is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia, where she was Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 2009 to 2014, and a Visiting Professor of Wuhan University, China. Educated in Norway, Switzerland, England and Australia, she has been teaching Literary Studies in Australia for over three decades. Her research interests have included postmodern fiction and theory, narratology, and postcolonial writing. She is best known for her work on Australian migrant writing, and on the literature of the Chinese diaspora. Recent publications include the essay ‘The Literatures of Chinese Australia’ in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (published in Chinese as 长江学术⟫,“澳大利亚华人(华裔)文学述评”. (卢秋平). (Yangtze River Academic, 2018 (2), 45–58.)

Notes

1 In 1996, Pauline Hanson of the One Nation Party famously declared in her maiden speech to the Australian House of Representatives that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians.’ (Hanson 1996). Hanson lost her seat in 1998, but was in 2016 re-elected to the Australian parliament, this time as a Senator.

2 For a more general discussion of Asian Australian women's fiction, see for example Ferrier (2017) and Ommundsen (2017).

3 For a discussion of the range of meaning of ‘Chinese’ in diaspora, see Ang (2001) and Ommundsen (2017). On the slippage between ‘Chinese’ and ‘Asian’, see in particular Khoo (2007).

4 The inclusion of Michele Lee's text in this essay is meant to provide a productive point of comparison that highlights the porousness between ‘Chinese’ and racial/regional categories such as ‘Asian’ or ‘East Asian.’ To provide further background, the Hmong are an ethnic group who mostly live in five present-day countries: Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and China. Members of the Hmong diaspora in the West largely originate from Laos, and were displaced as refugees after the Communist victory in 1975 due to their prior support for the United States (see the introduction to Sucheng Chan 1994, Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America for a detailed overview of Hmong history in Laos and the diaspora). In China, the Hmong are known as the Miao, one of the largest officially-recognized minority groups. Although diasporic Hmong generally trace their geographical origins as a group to places in present-day China, the relationship between Hmong and Miao, as well as Chinese, is complex. As anthropologist Louisa Schein notes, ‘while not coterminous with the Hmong, the Miao [are] in a certain sense an ethnic group, but one widely scattered and unified by neither a shared culture nor a universally intelligible language’ (xii; see Schein, Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China's Cultural Politics for an overview of Miao history and its relationship with the Hmong diaspora). Also relevant here is the centuries-long history of conflict between Miao and Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, who have not only exercised military and political power over the Miao, but also subjected them to widespread stereotyping as primitive and/or feminised (the establishment of the People's Republic of China afforded new opportunities for recognition and autonomy). For many Hmong outside China, the label Miao is seen as derogatory although it is widely used in China without such concerns. Mindful of the legacies of Han chauvinism, the inclusion of Miao/Hmong in this essay is not meant to slot them into a Chinese identity or to suggest that they identify themselves as Chinese, but rather to highlight the limits and instability of Chinese as a category that has been melded into a conception of ethnicity heavily linked to the nation-state.

5 For further discussion of the Chinese Australian press at the turn of the twentieth century, see Huang and Ommundsen (2015) and Huang and Ommundsen (2016).

6 多妻毒 (The Poison of Polygamy) was published in the Chinese language newspaper Chinese Times in 53 instalments between 8 June 1909 and 16 December 2010. The publication was anonymous but the author has recently been identified by the translator as Wong Shee Ping. A bilingual edition, translated by Ely Finch, was published by Sydney University Press in 2019. For my understanding of this text I am indebted to former and current PhD students, especially Huang Zhong and Lu Qiuping. For a detailed discussion of the novel and its context, see Huang and Ommundsen (2016).

7 On the comparison of Western and Chinese men in terms of models of masculinity, see Louie (2002) and Huang (2012). On the impact of Western literature and culture on Chinese conceptions of love, see Pan (2015). For the development of Chinese feminism, and Chinese feminist writing, see for example Hong Fincher (2018) and Schaffer and Song (2014).

8 See Zhong (2001). For a different account of mixed marriages in the Chinese Australian community in the 1990s, see Louie (2001).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, the University of Wollongong and the University of British Columbia.