ASIANING AUSTRALIA - NOTES TOWARD A CRITICAL TRANSNATIONALISM IN CULTURAL-STUDIES

This paper attempts to develop a critical transnationalist perspective in cultural studies from the localized cultural and political context of contemporary 'Australia'. It takes the Australian nation-state's c urrent gee-economic and gee-political preoccupation with a so-called ' push into Asia) as a starting point for a questioning of dominant disc ourses of international relations and the place of 'Australia' within it. In particular, the paper aims to deconstruct the binary divide bet ween 'Asia' and 'the West' which still informs official discourses of the 'Asianization' of Australia. In order to do this, it is suggested that the world must be conceived as a set of interconnected and interd ependent, but distinctive modernities, signalling both the success and the failure of the universalizing European project of modernity throu gh colonial expansion. From this historical perspective,'Asia' and 'Au stralia' no longer appear as absolute binary opposites, as they can bo th be seen as historical products of the European colonizing/modernizi ng project. The paper then moves on to critique the privileged status of the nation not only in the official international order but also in cultural studies. A critical transnationalist cultural studies must t ake the centrality of the nation-state in the modern world system seri ously, though not for granted. The nation-state is put within a transn ational frame by highlighting its complex and contradictory role withi n the fluid and dynamic forces of global capitalism. It is these force s which inform the current conflictual rapprochement of 'Australia' an d 'Asia'. However, this - desired and contested - rapprochement cannot be understood without its proper contextualization within and against the background of the divergent (post)colonial histories of both 'Aus tralia' (as a white-settler colony) and 'Asia'. This illuminates the n ecessity of addressing the intersections between cultural studies and postcolonial theory in developing a critical transnationalism.