An Asian American(ist) in OZ

In this talk, and drawing on her experiences as a Korean American Cultural Studies scholar in Sydney, Jane Chi Hyun Park reflects on the limits and potential of Asian American Studies as a political and intellectual model for doing Asian diasporic studies in Australia. The first part of the talk gives a brief overview of migration and multiculturalism in Australia to show how and why the notion of a racialized, culturally hybrid, and hyphenated identity central to US Ethnic Studies does not make sense there, or indeed in most parts of the world. The second part focuses on the recent evolution Asian Australian Studies which attempts to translate scholarship from Asian North American Studies, glocalizing it to account for the unique geographic, cultural, and economic position occupied by the Asian diaspora in Australia. Park ends by drawing on recent developments in Australian popular culture to suggest new research paths for comparative, collaborative research on Asian diasporas in the trans-pacific region.

Jane Chi Hyun Park, Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, writes on the politics of minority representation and cross-cultural aesthetics in US and Asian Pacific popular media. She is the author of Yellow Future: Oriental Style In Hollywood Cinema (2010), articles for journals such as Global Media Culture, Cultural Studies, World Literature Today, and Asian Studies Review, and chapters in anthologies such as East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005) and The Blackwell Companion To Film Comedy (2012). She is currently working on a project on imitation and the aesthetics of the Korean Wave.