Globalisation - Australia and Asia

Edward Said states, “No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are no more than starting points.” Said’s idea illustrates the evolution of relations between communities as a result of globalization, and the understanding and recognition of other cultures through the interpretation of cultural borders.

In this essay I will analyse to what extent globalisation is affecting identity formation, and also the roles of cultural borders in today’s world. I will assess whether through globalisation of the media we are in fact overcoming cultural borders and traditional stereotypes and in turn forging a mutual respect between foreign communities, or as Said argues (Said cited in Crary & Mariani1990), whether globalisation and Western media dominance through peripheral and Third World societies is perpetuating Western superiority, “the ever rolling march of commodification, the old form of globalisation, fully in keeping with the west, which is simply able to absorb everybody else within its drive” (Hall 1991), and spreading hegemony, with little or selected representation of local culture. I will be using studies of Australia/Asian relations to illustrate these ideas.

In order to apply these ideas to Australian and Asian relations, we must first establish how we some have come to realise that “no one today is purely one thing”, as opposed to years gone by. As Said (1978) and others have shown, Europe, from which Australia’s culture originates, has traditionally viewed Asia and Asians with contempt and inferiority, and “one of its deepest and most reoccurring images of Other” (Said 1978, p.1). Asians have been “repeatedly characterised by some western texts as alternatively lazy, stupid, mindless, barbaric and untrustworthy [which has] served as a guarantee of the ‘superiority of the Briton, American, German or Australian over many years” (Birch, Schirato & Srivastava 2001, p.5). As Said (1978, cited in Crary & Mariani1990) and Birch et al. (2001) show, Asians have been represented as inferior and essentially different to their colonising European counterparts. Australians, too, have looked (and arguably continue look) upon Asian people (and in light of this essay any other people) as essentially different to themselves.

As D’Cruz and Steele (2003) demonstrate, Asians have been ostracized in Australian societ...

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