Asian-Australian cinema, Asian-Australian modernity

Deposited with permission of University of Queensland PressThis chapter examines the emergence of Asian-Australian modernity through cinema as site of cultural production. Using three films to map three characteristics, this paper presents Asian-Australian modernity as constituted in a culture of mobility that reconfigures ethnicity and reconstitutes desire. Beginning with the narrative of Chinese heterogeneity in Won Ton Soup (Clara Law, 1993), this paper argues that such a narrative is delineated by a mobile trajectory called ‘going south’. This trajectory acknowledges the movement of Asian migration into Australia, and as a critical transnational direction, it characterises the emergence of Asian-Australian modernity. Implicit in this trajectory is the formation of a cultural diaspora. Using the performativity of ethnicity in Floating Life (Clara Law, 1996), this paper further argues that such a performativity articulates the diasporic affect of alienation, defamilarisation and dis-placement. As a form of differential repetition, it produces an incommensurability of difference that redefines the paradigm of ethnicity. Asian-Australian modernity is further characterised by a reconfiguration of ethnicity. Underpinning this reconfiguration is a reconstitution of desire. Examining the politics of intercultural queer desire in the experimental documentary China Doll (Tony Ayres, 1997), this paper argues that the shift of gay desire from a postcolonial ‘rice-and-potato’ hybrid sexuality to the ‘sticky rice’ model locates an agency framed by the ambiguity of Asian-Australian visibility and pride. Characterised by such a model of cultural desire, Asian-Australian modernity articulates an emergining identity that visibilises as well as questions the hegemonic forces surrounding its constitution, expression and production