Disciplining Asian Australian studies: Projections and introjections

Since its inception in the late 1990s, Asian Australian studies has been slowly gaining momentum and critical mass, to a point where it can now be considered a legitimate field of academic and cultural production. This essay addresses the current state of play in Asian Australian studies in relation to the changing national and global political climate. A genealogy of Asian Australian studies will be mapped in order to explore the politics of discipline formation within the Australian academy. In particular, the shift from positioning Asian cultural production within discourses of migrancy in Multicultural studies to the invocation of diaspora and hybridity in Asian Australian studies will be interpreted as specific acts of remapping the national imaginary. Consideration will also be given to how this reconfiguration has impacted on the adjacent fields of Asian and Australian studies.