Over the past decades, the nature of immigration to Australia has brought with it an intensificat... more Over the past decades, the nature of immigration to Australia has brought with it an intensification of diversity. This is not just about migrants coming to Australia from different ethnicities and countries of origin, but a range of other variables such as "differential immigration statuses, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents". Vertovec calls the interplay of these factors 'super-diversity'. This paper examines the situation of recently migrated Bengali speaking Muslim women in Australia and their adjustment to Australian society in this context, specifically the debates in the Bengali speaking community around contentious issues such as polygamy and veiling.
This article opens two new inquiries into Australia-India relations. First, substantial existing ... more This article opens two new inquiries into Australia-India relations. First, substantial existing analysis of the White Australia policy after the Second World War begins from Australian perspectives and sources: this article starts from the Indian side. It focuses on Indian women — on what they were reading in public media and what they said in speeches — because Indian women’s personal and political contacts with Australia increased during the Cold War. Secondly, we explore the contemporary potential of cross-cultural collaboration — between researchers from Australian and Indian backgrounds — to identify the dissonances in our interpretations and ask why those differences have arisen. This article has been peer reviewed.
Relationships between South Asians and Australians during the colonial period have been little in... more Relationships between South Asians and Australians during the colonial period have been little investigated. Closer attention to the dramatically expanded sea trade after 1850 and the relatively uncontrolled movement of people, ideas and goods which occurred on them, despite claims of imperial regulation, suggests that significant numbers of Indians among others entered Australia outside the immigration restrictions of empire or settlers. Given that many of them entered or remained in Australia without official sanction, their histories will not be found in the official immigration records, but rather in the memories and momentos of the communities into which they might have moved. Exploring the histories of Aboriginal communities and of maritime working class networks does allow a previously unwritten history to emerge: not only of Indian individuals with complex personal and working histories, but often as activists in the campaigns against racial discrimination and in support of ...
Concluding this volume is a meditation from Devleena Ghosh on the relationship of exile to place,... more Concluding this volume is a meditation from Devleena Ghosh on the relationship of exile to place, and about exile as a leitmotiv of contemporary displacement in an increasingly transnational world. For Ghosh the fundamental question posed by exile is, "How does one define the multivalent, multiplex condition of exile?" Ghosh identifies four nodes of exilic aspiration and struggle-exile as the future "will be"; exile as a nostalgia for privilege; exile as geography; exile as language-which either singly or in combination enable and disable the capacity for those in exile to be politically engaged, hence the global imperative for that engagement. Our tea is green and hot: drink it. Our pistachios are fresh; eat them. The beds are of green cedar, fall on them, following this long siege, lie down on the feathers of our dreams. The sheets are crisp, perfumes are ready by the door, and there are plenty of mirrors: Enter them so we may exist completely. Soon we will search in the margins of your history, in distant countries, for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves: Was Andalusia here or there? On the land…or in the poem? Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms are Never Finished 1 "Exile culture," writes Hamid Naficy, "is located in the intersections and the interstices of other cultures" (1993: 2). It has, according to Richard Eder, a climate, an ecology, an archaeology, a national smell (1999: 1
Development in India has been tied to the mining and burning of coal. This has led to dispossessi... more Development in India has been tied to the mining and burning of coal. This has led to dispossession. People are protesting against this dispossession. I interviewed Adivasis about coal mining in Chhattisgarh. Acts could be amended to protect Adivasis from coal exploitation.
Abstract The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth centu... more Abstract The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth century has been explored recently by authors such as Sugata Bose and Sunil Amrith who locate Burma within the wider migratory culture of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia. This article argues that the long and historical connections between Bengalis and Burmese were transformed by the British colonisation of the region. Through an analysis of selected literary texts in Bengali, some by well-known and others by obscure writers, this article shows that, for Indians, Burma constituted an elsewhere where the fantastic and superhuman were within reach, and caste and religious constraints could be circumvented and radical possibilities enabled by masquerade and disguise.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2015
Half a decade ago, after a spate of violent incidents in 2009 and 2010, where Indian students had... more Half a decade ago, after a spate of violent incidents in 2009 and 2010, where Indian students had been assaulted and robbed and one student, Nitin Garg, had been murdered, Indian students and taxi drivers held a big rally in Melbourne which made front-page news in India. The rally followed a number of demonstrations calling for greater police action and protection. The attacks had already attracted condemnation in the Indian media; for example, the influential Indian news magazine, Outlook, ran a cover story titled ‘Why the Aussies hate us’ (Outlook, 2010), concluding that Australia needed to examine its racial biases and the hangovers from the White Australia policy.
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2006
The articles in this special issue section of PORTAL had their first iteration as presentations i... more The articles in this special issue section of PORTAL had their first iteration as presentations in the Eighth Women in Asia Conference held at the University of Technology Sydney in 2005, the theme of which was ‘Shadow Lines’. The concept ‘Women in Asia’ is problematic since some of the major debates in gender or women’s studies have focused on the diversity of women’s life worlds and beings and the contested nature of the term ‘Asia’. As a theme it has the potential to become a holdall phrase for scholarship, research and activist work ‘from Suez to Suva’. However, reflecting on these difficult terms can be a creative and rewarding process. The attempt to locate Australia within the region, rather than within a putative ‘west’, and to deal with her geography rather than just her white history, can be an effective way of challenging many current ‘white blindfold’ discourses. At the same time, gendered analyses of society, politics and culture that attempt a re-insertion of ‘herstori...
Interdisciplinary approaches to the Indian Ocean are fairly new, and ecological topics in cultura... more Interdisciplinary approaches to the Indian Ocean are fairly new, and ecological topics in cultural studies more generally are also rare. This paper, then, is an attempt to begin discussion on these two fronts, hoping that further research will be able to document it in more detail. We cast our argument as being both about Indian Ocean stories and a story in itself, and cast it in three parts: the pre-colonial Indian Ocean, the colonial one, and the postcolonial or contemporary situation.
... Fazlbhoy Visram, a Khoja Muslim from Bombay, Justice of the Peace, Member of the Corporation,... more ... Fazlbhoy Visram, a Khoja Muslim from Bombay, Justice of the Peace, Member of the Corporation, Bombay, and partner in the Firm of Messrs. Visram Ebrahim and Co. ... 30. I am indebted to Samia Khatun (University of Sydney) for introducing me to this manuscript. ↵31. ...
Call centre workers are expected to ‘listen’ and provide both practical assistance and emotional ... more Call centre workers are expected to ‘listen’ and provide both practical assistance and emotional support to customers across the world. At the same time, they are supposed to subscribe to cultural and social traditions that ensure that they remain within family and societal control. This article discusses gender and work transformations of call centre workers in the context of the networks they create in their engagements, not only with their managers and co-workers but with their invisible clients and families and communities. Se espera que los trabajadores de los centros de llamadas ‘oigan’ y suministren tanto una asistencia práctica, como el apoyo emocional a los clientes alrededor del mundo. Al mismo tiempo, se supone que tienen que suscribirse a las tradiciones culturales y sociales que aseguran que se mantienen dentro del control social y familiar. Este artículo discute las transformaciones laborales y de género de todos los trabajadores de los centros de llamadas, en el contexto de las redes que ellos crean en su trabajo, no solo con sus gerentes y colegas, sino con sus clientes invisibles, familias y comunidades. 征召中心的工作人员有望“倾听”和向在世界各地的消费者提供适用的和情感性的协助。同时，他们被认为借助文化和社会传统以确保他们仍是属于家庭和社会的。本文讨论征召中心工作人员的性别和工作转型，背景是她们造就的网络，这不仅指的是她们的经理人员和共同工作的人，而且是她们看不见的客户、家庭和社区。 콜 센터 노동자들은 전세계 고객들의 이야기를 듣고 업무 지원과 감정적인 지원을 제공하는 것으로 기대된다. 동시에 그들은 가족과 사회적 통제에 확실하게 놓여있게 하기 위해서 문화적 전통과 사회적 전통을 따르도록 되어 있다. 이 글은 콜 센터 노동자들이 매니저들뿐만 아니라 보이지 않는 그들의 고객, 가족과 커뮤니티와 함께 그들이 만들어 내는 네트워크 맥락 속에서 네트워크 노동자들의 젠더와 일의 변화를 논의한다. Работники колл-центра, как ожидается, “выслушают” и обеспечат практическую помощь и эмоциональную поддержку клиентам во всем мире. В то же время, они должны подписаться на культурные и социальные традиции, которые гарантируют, что они остаются в пределах семьи и общественного контроля. В статье рассматривается гендерный фактор и преобразования работы колл-центра в контексте общественных сетей, которые они создают в рамках своих обязательств не только со своими менеджерами и сотрудниками, но и с невидимыми клиентами, семьями и общинами.
Over the past decades, the nature of immigration to Australia has brought with it an intensificat... more Over the past decades, the nature of immigration to Australia has brought with it an intensification of diversity. This is not just about migrants coming to Australia from different ethnicities and countries of origin, but a range of other variables such as "differential immigration statuses, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents". Vertovec calls the interplay of these factors 'super-diversity'. This paper examines the situation of recently migrated Bengali speaking Muslim women in Australia and their adjustment to Australian society in this context, specifically the debates in the Bengali speaking community around contentious issues such as polygamy and veiling.
This article opens two new inquiries into Australia-India relations. First, substantial existing ... more This article opens two new inquiries into Australia-India relations. First, substantial existing analysis of the White Australia policy after the Second World War begins from Australian perspectives and sources: this article starts from the Indian side. It focuses on Indian women — on what they were reading in public media and what they said in speeches — because Indian women’s personal and political contacts with Australia increased during the Cold War. Secondly, we explore the contemporary potential of cross-cultural collaboration — between researchers from Australian and Indian backgrounds — to identify the dissonances in our interpretations and ask why those differences have arisen. This article has been peer reviewed.
Relationships between South Asians and Australians during the colonial period have been little in... more Relationships between South Asians and Australians during the colonial period have been little investigated. Closer attention to the dramatically expanded sea trade after 1850 and the relatively uncontrolled movement of people, ideas and goods which occurred on them, despite claims of imperial regulation, suggests that significant numbers of Indians among others entered Australia outside the immigration restrictions of empire or settlers. Given that many of them entered or remained in Australia without official sanction, their histories will not be found in the official immigration records, but rather in the memories and momentos of the communities into which they might have moved. Exploring the histories of Aboriginal communities and of maritime working class networks does allow a previously unwritten history to emerge: not only of Indian individuals with complex personal and working histories, but often as activists in the campaigns against racial discrimination and in support of ...
Concluding this volume is a meditation from Devleena Ghosh on the relationship of exile to place,... more Concluding this volume is a meditation from Devleena Ghosh on the relationship of exile to place, and about exile as a leitmotiv of contemporary displacement in an increasingly transnational world. For Ghosh the fundamental question posed by exile is, "How does one define the multivalent, multiplex condition of exile?" Ghosh identifies four nodes of exilic aspiration and struggle-exile as the future "will be"; exile as a nostalgia for privilege; exile as geography; exile as language-which either singly or in combination enable and disable the capacity for those in exile to be politically engaged, hence the global imperative for that engagement. Our tea is green and hot: drink it. Our pistachios are fresh; eat them. The beds are of green cedar, fall on them, following this long siege, lie down on the feathers of our dreams. The sheets are crisp, perfumes are ready by the door, and there are plenty of mirrors: Enter them so we may exist completely. Soon we will search in the margins of your history, in distant countries, for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves: Was Andalusia here or there? On the land…or in the poem? Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms are Never Finished 1 "Exile culture," writes Hamid Naficy, "is located in the intersections and the interstices of other cultures" (1993: 2). It has, according to Richard Eder, a climate, an ecology, an archaeology, a national smell (1999: 1
Development in India has been tied to the mining and burning of coal. This has led to dispossessi... more Development in India has been tied to the mining and burning of coal. This has led to dispossession. People are protesting against this dispossession. I interviewed Adivasis about coal mining in Chhattisgarh. Acts could be amended to protect Adivasis from coal exploitation.
Abstract The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth centu... more Abstract The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth century has been explored recently by authors such as Sugata Bose and Sunil Amrith who locate Burma within the wider migratory culture of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia. This article argues that the long and historical connections between Bengalis and Burmese were transformed by the British colonisation of the region. Through an analysis of selected literary texts in Bengali, some by well-known and others by obscure writers, this article shows that, for Indians, Burma constituted an elsewhere where the fantastic and superhuman were within reach, and caste and religious constraints could be circumvented and radical possibilities enabled by masquerade and disguise.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2015
Half a decade ago, after a spate of violent incidents in 2009 and 2010, where Indian students had... more Half a decade ago, after a spate of violent incidents in 2009 and 2010, where Indian students had been assaulted and robbed and one student, Nitin Garg, had been murdered, Indian students and taxi drivers held a big rally in Melbourne which made front-page news in India. The rally followed a number of demonstrations calling for greater police action and protection. The attacks had already attracted condemnation in the Indian media; for example, the influential Indian news magazine, Outlook, ran a cover story titled ‘Why the Aussies hate us’ (Outlook, 2010), concluding that Australia needed to examine its racial biases and the hangovers from the White Australia policy.
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2006
The articles in this special issue section of PORTAL had their first iteration as presentations i... more The articles in this special issue section of PORTAL had their first iteration as presentations in the Eighth Women in Asia Conference held at the University of Technology Sydney in 2005, the theme of which was ‘Shadow Lines’. The concept ‘Women in Asia’ is problematic since some of the major debates in gender or women’s studies have focused on the diversity of women’s life worlds and beings and the contested nature of the term ‘Asia’. As a theme it has the potential to become a holdall phrase for scholarship, research and activist work ‘from Suez to Suva’. However, reflecting on these difficult terms can be a creative and rewarding process. The attempt to locate Australia within the region, rather than within a putative ‘west’, and to deal with her geography rather than just her white history, can be an effective way of challenging many current ‘white blindfold’ discourses. At the same time, gendered analyses of society, politics and culture that attempt a re-insertion of ‘herstori...
Interdisciplinary approaches to the Indian Ocean are fairly new, and ecological topics in cultura... more Interdisciplinary approaches to the Indian Ocean are fairly new, and ecological topics in cultural studies more generally are also rare. This paper, then, is an attempt to begin discussion on these two fronts, hoping that further research will be able to document it in more detail. We cast our argument as being both about Indian Ocean stories and a story in itself, and cast it in three parts: the pre-colonial Indian Ocean, the colonial one, and the postcolonial or contemporary situation.
... Fazlbhoy Visram, a Khoja Muslim from Bombay, Justice of the Peace, Member of the Corporation,... more ... Fazlbhoy Visram, a Khoja Muslim from Bombay, Justice of the Peace, Member of the Corporation, Bombay, and partner in the Firm of Messrs. Visram Ebrahim and Co. ... 30. I am indebted to Samia Khatun (University of Sydney) for introducing me to this manuscript. ↵31. ...
Call centre workers are expected to ‘listen’ and provide both practical assistance and emotional ... more Call centre workers are expected to ‘listen’ and provide both practical assistance and emotional support to customers across the world. At the same time, they are supposed to subscribe to cultural and social traditions that ensure that they remain within family and societal control. This article discusses gender and work transformations of call centre workers in the context of the networks they create in their engagements, not only with their managers and co-workers but with their invisible clients and families and communities. Se espera que los trabajadores de los centros de llamadas ‘oigan’ y suministren tanto una asistencia práctica, como el apoyo emocional a los clientes alrededor del mundo. Al mismo tiempo, se supone que tienen que suscribirse a las tradiciones culturales y sociales que aseguran que se mantienen dentro del control social y familiar. Este artículo discute las transformaciones laborales y de género de todos los trabajadores de los centros de llamadas, en el contexto de las redes que ellos crean en su trabajo, no solo con sus gerentes y colegas, sino con sus clientes invisibles, familias y comunidades. 征召中心的工作人员有望“倾听”和向在世界各地的消费者提供适用的和情感性的协助。同时，他们被认为借助文化和社会传统以确保他们仍是属于家庭和社会的。本文讨论征召中心工作人员的性别和工作转型，背景是她们造就的网络，这不仅指的是她们的经理人员和共同工作的人，而且是她们看不见的客户、家庭和社区。 콜 센터 노동자들은 전세계 고객들의 이야기를 듣고 업무 지원과 감정적인 지원을 제공하는 것으로 기대된다. 동시에 그들은 가족과 사회적 통제에 확실하게 놓여있게 하기 위해서 문화적 전통과 사회적 전통을 따르도록 되어 있다. 이 글은 콜 센터 노동자들이 매니저들뿐만 아니라 보이지 않는 그들의 고객, 가족과 커뮤니티와 함께 그들이 만들어 내는 네트워크 맥락 속에서 네트워크 노동자들의 젠더와 일의 변화를 논의한다. Работники колл-центра, как ожидается, “выслушают” и обеспечат практическую помощь и эмоциональную поддержку клиентам во всем мире. В то же время, они должны подписаться на культурные и социальные традиции, которые гарантируют, что они остаются в пределах семьи и общественного контроля. В статье рассматривается гендерный фактор и преобразования работы колл-центра в контексте общественных сетей, которые они создают в рамках своих обязательств не только со своими менеджерами и сотрудниками, но и с невидимыми клиентами, семьями и общинами.
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