|
|
| |
BOOK
REVIEW
Asia's noisome neighbor
Australia's
Ambivalence towards Asia by J V D'Cruz and William
Steele
Reviewed by Marco Garrido
 "You want to sleep with Asians," a
Taiwanese businessman said of Australia, "but you dream
different dreams." Australia's "different dreams" -
it dreams of
being considered a part of Asia while, at the same time,
considering itself apart from it - inform the heart of
Australia's Ambivalence towards Asia by J V
D'Cruz and William Steele.
D'Cruz is a professor
in Australia-Asia relations at the Monash Asia Institute
in Monash University, Clayton, Australia; Steele is a
research associate at the same institute. For the
authors, Australia's ambivalence toward Asia has a lot
to do with its ambivalence toward itself; toward the
"others" that comprise (compromise?) itself -
Aboriginals and Asians mainly but also "the disowned,
despised aspects of the Australian self" - who have been
occluded by an anxiously promulgated Anglo-Australian
self-image.
Ashis Nandy, in his foreword, states
the thesis most explicitly: "With an immense
psychological effort, [Australia] has displaced its
self-hatred on to others who symbolize [its] discarded
self. White Australia has to look at the Asian
and indigenous Australians as well as its Asian
neighbors as inferior and fearsome, for it has itself
felt inferior, and it has feared its own self -
socially, culturally, morally."
D'Cruz and
Steele spend the rest of the book not so much arguing
the accuracy of this thesis as demonstrating it. They
portray an Australia that is loud and loutish,
blundering through international affairs and blinded by
delusions it has trouble believing in itself. This is a
nation whose insecurity compels self-definition in the
negative: Australia is secular (it rejects religion),
populist (it rejects the intellectual), white (it
rejects the non-white) and masculine (it rejects the
value of the feminine). The authors call this "negative
superiority ... felt in terms of excesses and
perversions avoided [in contrast to its Asian neighbors]
rather than achievements".
That it must
broadcast its self-image throughout the region as
normative makes it a particularly noisome neighbor. And
it's Australia's censoriousness, more than its national
neurosis, that's really at issue. The authors make the
point without masking their disgust: Australia's
trumpeting of egalitarianism, democracy and human rights
- its self-conceit as the standard-bearer of a benighted
Asia - is shamelessly hypocritical.
Not only are
the standards it seeks to export chauvinistic, it itself
fails to meet these standards at home. D'Cruz and Steele
describe a liberal democracy circumscribed by racism,
with the values of white Australia held up as the values
for all Australians to emulate. Australia's peoples of
color are thus put to the impossible task of becoming
white. They must fail, and, at best, fall into a
category marked by hyphenations connoting separateness,
such as Asian-Australian. At worst, as with the
Aboriginals, white Australia disowns them altogether,
and not without revulsion. Of course, with the exception
of a Pauline Hanson, none of this is spoken of. But even
then, Hanson's exceptionality assuages more than it
unsettles, reassuring polite white society of their
enlightenment, that racism in Australia is "beyond the
palisade as characteristic of a few country rednecks
only".
Turtle Beach
D'Cruz and
Steele target Australia's hypocrisy through the text
Turtle Beach. Blanche d'Alpuget's book, the
authors admit, "hardly has the esthetic or academic
qualities to fit into anybody's idea of the canonical"
(despite having won a number of Australian book awards).
They use it mainly because they see it as representing a
widespread Australian perspective, as being born "out of
the very nerve center of Australian 'liberal
enlightenment'".
As such, readers find in it an
affirmation of their own racism. If its
quasi-documentary style is misleading, then it only
misleads into misperceptions already held. A climactic
scene depicting Malaysians massacring refugees (while a
white Australian photojournalist looks on in anguish),
although entirely made up, tends to be taken in
unquestioningly - perhaps, the authors argue, because
there is nothing to question. The scene only confirms
readers' misperceptions of reality, of Malaysian
brutality vis-a-vis Australian compassion.
Asians are further demeaned in the way they are
made to speak. Their ridiculous, incompetent English
makes them caricatures of their ethnicity. Malaysian
speakers heavily use the present progressive tense.
Malaysian-Chinese speakers omit words - "'I sick man. I
very sick. I work'" - while Malaysian-Indian speakers
add words, particularly the tag "isn't it?", to
punctuate their statements. Even a character of French
and Vietnamese descent who learned her English in
Australia inscrutably interjects the Malaysian "la" into
her speech. These failed versions of English conform to
a pattern of character ascription throughout Turtle
Beach: the Indians are mystical, the Chinese
mechanical, and the Malaysians animalistic. They also
impute envy; "always indicating aspirations to a pure
white variety (whether Cambridge or Newcastle)".
D'Cruz and Steele go on to rehearse more
sophisticated arguments, but their basic contention is
at its most compelling in those examples that require
the least argument, that are instantly identifiable by
peoples of color as instances of discrimination. One
thinks of a slight but telling incident when two
characters meet for lunch at a Canberra hotel. "A
waiter, an Australian", brings them food. The authors
write, "In Australia, one expects people to be
Australian ...". Clearly, what was really meant is that
the waiter was white. For a moment, the mask of
inclusiveness slips, revealing the secret exclusivity of
nationality. Examples like these back the authors' basic
contention that Australian racism, directed abroad and
within its borders, is not only real but practiced in an
unself-conscious manner and with an obnoxious whiff of
self-congratulation. This is the racism not of rednecks
but of liberals, all the more dangerous for its
subtlety.
Deconstructing the West ... with a
sledgehammer
In the middle of Australia's
Ambivalence, the authors take a rather lengthy
detour - occupying a third of the book - ostensibly to
amplify their argument. They take aim at the duplicity
and chauvinism of Western liberalism. These chapters,
tedious in the familiarity of their argument, make for
hard slogging. We already know the bottom line is
Western hypocrisy, but we feel obliged to slog through
the sprawl anyway if only to get at the bits about
Australia.
The argument - although it can feel
like a hectoring - is that Western nations brandish the
terms "liberalism" and "democracy" to suit their own
agendas. They call liberalism universal and scrupulously
monitor Asian conformity with their standards. Asia
comes up deficient, of course - because Asian norms are
understood through Western terminology (hence,
misunderstood) and because, for the most part, the West
fails to recognize the legitimacy of Asian differences.
In any case, what really matters is the compliance of
Asian governments with Western interests, not the actual
cultivation of liberal democratic traditions.
D'Cruz and Steele also manage to hit the United
States in all the usual places: for its money politics,
its racism, its thinly guised imperialism, and its
substandard human-rights record. If none of this is
altogether inaccurate, none of it is altogether new. It
is a rehash of accusations comprising not so much an
argument as a diatribe, one in which the authors seem to
delight. But its tendentiousness is a turn-off. More
than that, it can be unnerving. Consider the bluntness
of the following passage:
After all, the US response to the incident
of 11 September 2001 is retaliation to retaliation;
the incident was the first time that the US was made
significantly subject to the kind of misery it has
long inflicted on others. But the US does not notice
this; it only notices what impinges upon
itself. Perhaps a bit of bluntness is
unavoidable when attempting to demark the shades of
difference distinguishing Asia's political culture from
the West's, which the authors go on to do. Still, some
of their characterizations come off a bit too bald. "The
aim of government" in Southeast Asia, they claim, "is to
maintain harmony among the polity and to promote
prosperity for the people". One wonders if this isn't
the aim of all governments; then one wonders if the
authors have ever visited the Philippines. The point is,
one already risks bluntness in accounting for the shades
of difference among Southeast Asian political cultures;
attempting to do a similar accounting between Asia and
the West risks caricature. Caricature - so we learned
from d'Alpuget's example - is best avoided.
A
tragic portrait
D'Cruz and Steele fare better on
home ground. At their best, their depiction of
Australia's predicament elicits a kind of pathos. They
portray a nation claiming to belong in Asia, yet
fundamentally out of place because it insists on its
difference and implies its superiority. A nation
stricken by survival anxieties, hobbled by a chronic
fear of invasion from brown and yellow shores, and thus,
alternately toadying and truculent toward its neighbors.
A nation bragging strength to mask weakness and
dependence, eagerly deputizing itself under the "war on
terror", rattling the saber of preemptive strikes at its
neighbors, despite its lack of heart for such
saber-rattling, in order to please the American sheriff.
A nation ultimately concerned not just with its place in
Asia, or in the world, but in history. The authors cite
Peter Coleman:
As Australians we like to tell ourselves
that our country is the envy of the world ... But a
voice from history sometimes whispers even to the most
purblindly patriotic among us that we may be perhaps a
little, shall we say, spiritually arid and culturally
sterile; that some of our Napoleons of commerce,
politics, sport and entertainment are louts, yahoos
and pygmies; that we might as a nation disappear from
the face of the earth and few in the world would care
or notice. Ashis Nandy observes that
Asia too is ambivalent toward Australia, regarding it
warily as a Western nation that somehow ended up in
their backyard. There could have been another Australia
if the first settlers - not all criminals, some
dissenters of various shades - had embraced the
possibilities of their freedom instead of hiding from it
and had set about building not a Europe in the East but
an anti-Europe, a country of dissent. As such, Australia
could genuinely have been a bridge between two worlds.
D'Cruz and Steele suggest this still could be,
if Australia turns inward and recognizes its "others".
But they labor under the weight of their own analysis,
and the note of hope rings hollow given their tragic
portrait.
Australia's Ambivalence towards
Asia by J V D'Cruz and William Steele (Monash Asia
Institute, 2003). ISBN: 1 876924 09 8; 466 pages (341
pages excluding end notes, bibliography etc). Price:
A$49.95 (US$39.35).
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
