Becoming and unbecoming Asian in Sydney

This paper focuses on moments of global Asianness by looking at the ways people of Asian background “become Asian” in Sydney. Our interest is in the ways in which being Asian is both an inscription into a racialized identity (it is not a self-evident identity nor one that is taken up outside certain contexts) as well as a space in which a commonality can be found. With data from both our metrolingualism project and another looking at Vietnamese students studying in Sydney, we examine the ways they take on or shed Asian identities. We also draw attention to the importance of assemblages of people, objects, and language in particular places at particular times, and how these produce and re-semiotize cultural inferences and identifications. Global Asianness, therefore, is only partly about a new and resurgent Asia replacing Europe as the axis of the world; it is also about a longer history of people, places, and things, about spoons, vegetables, and fish sauce, and the affordances they bring for being Asian. It is a multivocal and multilayered push and pull between predefined notions of otherness and possibilities of affiliation that might not otherwise have existed