Asian Australian Hybrid Praxis

Abstract

Contemporary theorization of cosmopolitanism has struggled to unhinge the concept from its genealogy in early modern European expansionism. In the words of Anthony Pagden, ‘it is hard to see how cosmopolitanism can be entirely separated from some kind of “civilizing” mission, or from the more humanizing aspects of the various imperial projects with which it has been so long associated’ (2000: 4). One of the central aims in the configuration of a ‘new’ cosmopolitanism has been to particularize and, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘provincialize’ cosmopolitan theorizing so as to diminish its privileged Eurocentricism. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘vernacular’ is particularly salient in this regard since it aims to destabilize and decentralize dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism by bringing it into conversation and collision with minoritarian and subaltern experiences of border-crossings. Vernacular cosmopolitanism is not, therefore,

of the elite variety inspired by universalist patterns of humanistic thought that run gloriously across cultures, establishing an enlightened unity. Vernacular cosmopolitans are compelled to make a tryst with cultural translation as an act of survival. Their specific and local histories, often threatened and repressed, are inserted ‘between the lines’ of dominant cultural practices.

(Bhabha, 2000: 139)

But how is it to land and not land, my wings rearranging themselves for home and not home?

(Merlinda Bobis, 1996)