‘I Don’t Want to Look Too Fresh off the Boat, You Know?’ Nationhood and Belonging: The Cruel Optimism of Contemporary Australian Multiculturalism

Abstract

Taking the debate about cultural appropriation as a starting point, this article explores the relationship different members of the South Asian Australian diaspora have to the Australian multicultural project. Specifically, this article employs an archive of interviews from 2018 with second-generation South Asian Australian women and their (first-generation) mothers and/or grandmothers and explores how they feel about the cultural appropriation of South Asian cultural artefacts (hereafter, ‘Indo chic’). These interviews revealed that first-generation respondents were generally uncritical of Indo chic and perceived non-South Asian Australians consuming South Asian cultural artefacts as a sign of positive cross-cultural exchange that is emblematic of Australian multiculturalism. The second-generation respondents, however, felt threatened by Indo chic and felt appropriation was a racist microaggression that served to reiterate their racial difference (and inferiority) in a white settler society. The generational difference in sentiment reveals a productive fissure within migrant Australian communities to interrogate our feelings about being and feeling ‘Australian’. This article argues that conversations and debates about ‘Indo chic’ within South Asian Australian diasporas reveal the contours of what it is like to be a South Asian woman in contemporary multicultural Australia while also revealing flaws in the Australian multicultural project. In this article, I employ an affective analysis of their responses, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s idea of ‘cruel optimism’ and Sara Ahmed’s conceptions of love and the nation to fully explore the complicated somatics ‘Indo chic’ debates reveal for my respondents.