Journal article

Australia’s ‘Asian Century’: Time, Space and Public Culture

F Martin, C Healy, K Iwabuchi, O Khoo, C Maree, K Yi, A Yue

The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus | Japan Focus | Published : 2015

Abstract

In this essay we consider ongoing public-cultural discussions about Australia’s situation in ‘the Asian century’ as symptomatic of a conjunctural moment in Australian social life: a historical phase that is given distinctive shape by the convergence of the discourses of paranoid nationalism and free-market (inter)nationalism. We argue that the co-existence of these two (deeply contradictory) imaginaries as the dominant available rubrics for configuring ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ in relation to each other results in a profoundly impoverished understanding of current conditions. We propose that an account of some very differently configured relationships between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ drawn from ..

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