There Goes the Neighbourhood!: the (Indian)-Subcontinental in the Asian/Australian literary precinct

This article intervenes in the ongoing debate about the nature of Asian Australian Writing, a debate that started sometime circa 2000s and seems to have gathered some force with the putative rise of global Asia and especially with regards to Australia’s own growing realisation of its geographical positioning. In its early stages, the referent for this academic debate was Asian-American Studies and whether or not it made sense for such a trans-Atlantic term to be applied to the Australian region. In the last decade, Australia’s position within the Asian geopolitical region has been increasingly articulated with respect to bilateral exchange with its immediate neighbours, mainly in the arena of trade and security. Writing this article in 2012, it seems that the two strands, the academic and the geographical, have strategically merged to define the parameters of Asian Australian Writing. This is not a new merging of course. Australia’s relationship with Asia has been filtered through its political relationship with the United States of America since the 1960s, and some of the debates regarding Asianness in the US academic model have been received as well as resisted in Australia’s own engagement with Asia. To pose the question of Asian Australian Writing at this moment, as the geopolitical equations of the globe seem to be shifting, is to resurrect those old questions, and to rearticulate them in a manner that makes sense in the here and the now. But far more importantly, to raise the question of Asian Australian Writing is to raise, yet again, the prickly canonical question of a national literature in Australia, while locating it within the transnational flow of academic trends. As Tseen Khoo notes in her ‘Introduction’ to Locating Asian Australian Cultures, ‘as with any emerging “studies” field, Asian Australian studies’ constant features will include deliberations over its own definition, boundaries and purpose’ (2). This article is an acknowledgement of those deliberations and an attempt to assess the general place of the ‘Asian’ in Australian literature and, more particularly, the specificity of one oft-neglected constituency in the Asian Australian imaginary: the Indian/subcontinental.