Home and Away: when a male chef longs for Thanksgiving

I was engrossed in an episode of Ugly Delicious, an eight-part Netflix series produced by, and starring Momofuku founder David Chang when the news of Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide appeared on my phone. Not only were my plans to critique the maverick persona of male celebrity chefs for an upcoming conference paper thrown askew, but I also felt sad for so many food explorers and writers, of any gender. This sadness wasn’t a mere homage to Bourdain’s culinary career; it came from a place of studying food media and the performance of masculine adventure for several years, and realising that the lettuce always seemed crisper on the more mobile plate.

What I mean is that as a woman, I long to explore cities and cultures with the same lack of reservation as the likes of Bourdain, Chang, and Rick Stein. Perhaps I also want to aid the decentring of whiteness in multicultural scholarship (and in food and travel writing) in the process. Yet, re-watching Chang’s episode on ‘Home Cooking’ for the purposes of my paper was an exercise in exploratory ambivalence. His chosen narrative is one of dissociating himself from Korean food at the beginning of his career, going on to bend all the rules through a globe-spanning noodle bar, and then declaring towards middle age that he wanted simpler, more home-style food in his restaurants. This could be read as an over-romanticisation of roots, and as essentialising the feminine (he declares at one point that his grandmother and mother only knew to express their love through food).  Moreover, research on chefs of colour seems to indicate that they are more likely to use tropes of family and ethnicity in their business and self-presentation. Chang, however, treads a fine balance between home and away in this series as a whole by being equally comfortable cooking shrimp toast in his mother’s kitchen before Thanksgiving dinner, and tasting tortellini in a Michelin-star restaurant in Modena, Italy.

Also notable about this series is its exposition of male sociality around food. There is no death of the meat and building a barbecue in the backyard narrative, as well as forays to exotic places to sample strange creatures. However, what is distinctive is that the friendship between Chang and food critic Peter Meehan also has a cozy domestic dimension. Meehan joins him for the preparation of the above-mentioned Thanksgiving meal, and Chang declares that he is practically family. While it is common to see men cooking alongside each other in food television (such as in the Australian-based Surfing the Menu, which I examined in my book), this is rarely done in a home space. Let's hope this is the beginning many different kinds of culinary convivialities which are less invested in gendered performativity, both on and off the screen.

Will this series also encourage other male chefs, white or not, to make more than a passing reference to their nonnas? Will they be happily seen in their home kitchen teaching their daughters as well as their sons how to fold a dumpling? Will they valorise aspects of the culinary past, but also see the unfair division or domestic labour that was unwelcome for many women? Will they value the emotional labour of their partners who come to terms with their long working hours and prolonged absences? Will they recognise that wanting to be more grounded at times doesn’t make them less of a man, and might even be good for their well-being?

And for the women who want to cook, explore, and write about food, perhaps we need not emulate the model of relentless road tripping. We could also acknowledge the recipes and rituals passed down to use from our mostly female relatives, but help redefine foodwork as everyone’s work, and leisure. Media personalities like Nigella Lawson have done some pioneering re-jigging of cooking as self-pleasure in this regard. However, we have a while to go before this becomes a widespread domestic reality, especially for women who are not born with middle class capital.

Forthcoming Monograph

Readers of this blog, I finally have a forthcoming sole-authored monograph after almost a decade of starting this blog. It is titled, The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia, and will be published by Rowman and Littlefield International in early 2018.

Use this link to pre-order the book.

Hunting...for Turkish Bread

Image: Author's own, taken in Bushwick (Brooklyn) in May 2016

It is a hot day in Sydney
and I am swimming in
literature and gentrification.

I read A Little Life
about twenty-something artists, slumming it in an apartment in Manhattan.

And picture novelist Hari Kunzru
in East London, not playing at authenticity
yet partial to nice raclette.

Then I recall summer conversations
with a Sydney undertone, discussing
renovations and rentals.

Debating first homes and investments
in the same breath as veganism
and climate change, over piccolos.

I go hunting for bread for a Marrickville
picnic, and decide it has to be Turkish
preferably not store-bought.

Men who Cook, and Women who Explore

I have usually gone out with men who are better cooks than me. This is not in any way a reflection on my culinary skills (which are competent, by the way). Rather, early in my self-formation as a feminist, I begun to conflate care work with practices such as cooking. Therefore, a partner with domestic inclinations has always been more desirable that someone who simply 'brings home the bread' (so to speak).

During the course of my research on gender and cooking shows, I have realised that the sort of 'domestic masculinity' epitomised by cool dads like Jamie Oliver and Curtis Stone is not identical to the house-bound drudgery that women have voluntarily and involuntarily undertaken through the course of history. Researchers such as Isabelle de Solier refer to these food-oriented activities jovially carried out by the 'new lads' of culinary television as 'productive leisure'. This is by no means a suggestion that men in middle class contexts in the Global North don't participate in less glamorous household tasks such as washing and cleaning. However, in the realm of food growing, procurement, and preparation, men (and some women) can now afford to be leisurely, innovative, and even artisanal. There is also, of course, a long tradition of associating men with meat (now manifested in the suburban bloke 'manning' the barbecue), while women are seen as more likely to want to make pretty desserts. And then there is the notion that men have the knowledge and skills, and can therefore cook if needed or in the case of a special event, while the daily task of feeding the family largely falls on women.

Add to this the vast numbers of men and women who have been brought up in families where, for a range of cultural or institutions reasons, the fathers never raised a spatula over a stove. I think you have probably guessed why I make such a fuss about men who cook, even though there are a myriad ways of showing care and practicing equality.

Coming back to television cooks and chefs though, they have also tended towards male explorers in exotic locations, while their female counterparts bake carrot cakes in cosy cottages, or instruct daytime audiences on what to do with leftovers and pantry items. This has undoubtedly begun to shift with the arrival of programs like MasterChef Australia, Food Safari, Poh and Co, and the almost culinary show that is Annabelle Crabb's Kitchen Cabinet.What I am unsure of, however, is whether the proficient female cooks and presenters on these programs are simply mimicking the male explorer (and harking back to our colonial baggage), or if there are re-inventing culinary and colonial exploration altogether. Perhaps this is a mere shift of format expected by modern narrowcast audiences, and male television cooks are joining new exploratory mode and moment too.

I will be looking closely at a season each of Italian Food Safari (presented by adventurous mum-next-door Maeve O'Maera) and Surfing the Menu (with cosmopolitan yet Aussie beach boy chefs Curtis and Bender) to figure this out!

On Eating to Become More than Who You Are

My 'research' yesterday consisted of catching up on the latest episode of 'Poh and Co.' on SBS on Demand, continuing my viewing of an older Aussie foodie program called 'Surfing the Menu', distractedly watching 'MasterChef' while making dinner, and then switching to the ABC when I realised that Annabel Crabb was interviewing Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on 'Kitchen Cabinet'. What a leisurely research life! To add to your culinary envy, I will admit that I also went to a fabulous local exhibition on the weekend that consisted of photographs of people cooking in their kitchens in the Greek city of Kos, and in my neighbourhood of Marrickville.

Author's own image at the entrance of 'The Community Kouzina Project' exhibition,
part of Open Marrickville

The photographer, Eleni Christou (who also happens to be an anthropologist and a resident of Marrickville) told me that she was interested in seeing whether her neighbours only cooked the food of their own cultures, and was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case. She also recounted tales of visiting the Vietnamese stores on Illawarra Road, and hearing Greek women talk over okra. This was all very heartening for me as well, given that my recently-contract book project, 'Bonding Over Food: Becoming Ethically Convivial in Australia' is interested in mapping the potential of food to facilitate genuine inter-cultural encounters. 

At the same time, I wonder if 'we are what we eat' is a convenient yet ultimately meaningless shorthand for the acceptance of multiple cultures (and their values). Perhaps those who venture into exotic food territory, in terms of both their eating and cooking practices, do not become open to inter-cultural understanding just by virtue of trying a new spice. However, food can open doors if we want, and are in the right social conditions for those becomings to take place. These transactions may begin in a commercial realm, such as in a farmers' market, and then become habitual. Habit can then lead to conviviality, which is everyday rather than reliant on one-off tokenistic events such as 'Harmony Day'. 

I have never consciously eaten to become more than who I am, but my culinary adventurism has certainly paralleled my interest in cosmopolitanism. It helps that I have class privilege, and live in Sydney's inner west. It is perhaps at this intersection of mobility and habit that we start to eat to become more than who we are.

Avocado Toast as the Fabric of Life: Musings on Comfort, Discomfort and Food Television

After watching a rather emotionally intense film on a long-haul flight, I decide to switch to an episode of Simply Nigella. It reminds me of the comfort provided by turning on MasterChef at the end of a tiring day of teaching and meetings. The only caveat is that this is not the simplistic comfort of nostalgia for lost homes and cultures, even though it may have some link to a real or imagined past. In my case, it combines leisure, domesticity and research, and who could resist such televisual versatility?

The said episode begins with Nigella Lawson reveling in the pleasure of both consuming and making food, and stating how comforting it is to begin her day with avocado on toast and the daily newspaper. She even goes so far as to call it the ‘fabric of her life’. Only the domestic goddess herself could get away with a ‘recipe’ for avocado toast on prime-time network television (that happens to also make its way to in-flight entertainment)! She does, however, add dill to her version, and garnishes the darn thing with such pretty-looking radishes that one has newfound respect for that humble root vegetable.

 Smashed avocado on toast also happens to be the much-maligned food staple of the Australian hipster – it can be found on most inner city brunch menus, and has even been appropriated by Maccas stores in suburbia. Despite frequenting these cafes for flat whites and wifi, I rarely eat avocado on toast outside the realm of my own kitchen. In fact, for someone who once ate muesli bars for breakfast, I now derive great pleasure in picking just-ripe avocados from the local grocery store, making sure I have just enough time to smash some on a piece of toast every other morning, and add lemon juice and pepper. It becomes the fabric for a day which may or may not go my way, but at least I kicked it off with a bite of comfort.

I can’t recall precisely when this food choice became comfortable. It may have been when an ex insisted on having avocado rather than store-bought guacamole on his toast. However, I don’t associate my attachment to avocado toast with an individual or an event – it has become something I have made into my own ritual. Nor is it a simple case of wanting the cultural capital accrued to having avocado on toast for breakfast in contemporary, middle class Australia. Perhaps this is not dissimilar to people who make and consume certain foods, or watch food television to derive sensory pleasure rather than acquire/demonstrate skills or cultural know-how. It may not be possible to entirely dissociate this from the formation of middle class taste cultures, but affective attachments to food and food media cannot be solely explained by the desire to appear more upwardly mobile.

Further in the episode, Nigella reveals that she has just returned from a long-awaited trip to Thailand, where she saw many unfamiliar vegetables. She then shows us snapshots of said produce, highlighting her interest in ‘green and pink’ things. We also see a picture of her with frizzy hair at the beach, and are thereby let into her world like an intimate friend dropping by for a snack and a chat. The snack in question is her take on stir-fry – she makes Thai glass noodles with prawns in a dark sauce consisting strong spices such as whole cinnamon and aniseed. In the moment of tossing together the noodles and sauce in the wok, she explains that this is not so much a case of using unfamiliar foods, but using familiar ones in unfamiliar combinations. So, while the avocado on toast in the previous segment was a straightforward case of comfortable food, the Thai noodles embody the comfortingly unfamiliar.

It would be easy, again, to offhandedly dismiss the ‘comfortingly unfamiliar’ as white middle class interest in exotic food catered to their palates, and served on a platter in inner city restaurants (Ghassan Hage’s moniker for this phenomenon is ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’). I am not sure that Thai noodles are the recipe for anti-racism or more inter-cultural interaction. At the same time, what we understand as Thai cuisine is too popular in Sydney to be unremarkable. According to a recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Pad Thai is the city’s most popular take-away item. In fact, Pad Thai might be to Sydney what pizza is to New York, and Chicken Tikka Masala in to London. On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I was craving Thai flavours and came across a blog post by as Australian traveller suggesting that only one restaurant on the island came close to matching the Thai food available in Sydney.

Sometimes a desire for the unfamiliar can become the fabric of life. When and where is a matter ripe for research, and food television.

From Student Laksa to Pho with Free-range Chicken

A few days ago, I cooked laksa for some friends at my new apartment in Marrickville, in Sydney’s inner west. This was the 8th time I had moved house since arriving in Australia as an international student in 2003. For reasons both economic and emotional, it was probably also the most worry-free of all my previous changes of residence. I recall the more troublesome of these as being uprootings that took a while to turn into everyday rituals around a home and a neigbourhood.

The first time I tasted laska at a stall in Chinatown in Adelaide, I was hooked. As someone of Indian heritage who could not digest chili, this was a soup that packed a range of tangy and deep flavours without the need to up the ante on heat. My forays into the foods of south-east Asia at the time had less to do with trying to be a cosmopolitan foodie, and were more about the migration history of inner city Adelaide, the composition of its international student body in the early 2000s, and my enrolment in courses where I socialised with ‘internationals’ from ethnicities other than my own.

I recall saving money from my causal hospitality jobs to go out for lunch with my friend Kasumi about once a week, right after our comparative politics class. We would pass notes to decide where we were going to eat, and what. I looked forward to these outings, which later became a more regular phenomenon as life became easier. If it wasn’t a catch up with a friend at Penang Hawker’s Corner in Renaissance Arcade just before I took my next tutorial as a PhD student, it would be a pit stop at K-Noodle on Pulteney Street so I could write in my office until sundown. These foodscapes of Asian food in Adelaide became so familiar and nourishing as to entirely replace my original diasporic craving for Indian roti. But I still wasn’t doing the adventurous cosmopolitan thing. Perhaps I wasn’t in the correct tax bracket to be a connoisseur of the world.

Researching these affective food geographies now, as a more sure-footed scholar, I realise that laksa is an inherently hybrid Pernakan (or amalgamation of Chinese and Malay elements) dish. In its Adelaide context, it is also the perfect food metaphor for migrant journeying that occurs outside of the traditional paradigms of ‘host’ and ‘home’ nation. As Adelaide-based cultural studies academic Jean Duruz writes, ‘While I am not an “authentic” member of the Singaporean/Malaysian community in Adelaide, this dish is, though differently, “embedded” here in my own culinary history. “Do you remember your first taste of laksa?”, Adelaide people ritually ask’ (2011: 62).

In Sydney though, I think the question might be, “Do you remember your first taste of pho?”, with most pronouncing the name of this ubiquitous Vietnamese broth phonetically. So while I cook laksa for my friends at home, I realise that I tend to gravitate towards pho when eating out in Marrickville. This is largely because it once had a large Vietnamese migrant community, and now has both hole-in-wall places as well as fancier establishments selling somewhat traditional pho (including, as I discovered recently with a friend, pho with free-range chicken).

It is perhaps this newly-acquired enchantment with Vietnamese flavours, and coffee that led me to plan one of the few non-work, non-family trips of my adult life. While on a city tour of Ho Chi Minh City that took us to an air-conditioned establishment selling pho, with fresh basil and bean sprouts on the side to boot, I was surprised to discover that my fellow Australian tour mates from Canberra had never tried it before. I was reminded of a young Anglo-Australian friend in Adelaide who was similarly well-travelled, but not acquainted with the Adelaidean love affair with laksa.

On a street food tour in Hanoi, Vietnam

While I am thus tempted to jump to a conclusion about white, middle class travellers who are culinary adventurers looking for difference, I will refrain from doing so. Referring to seminal work on culinary tourism by Lucy M Long and Lisa Heldke, Molz comes to the conclusion that those of non-white backgrounds can also engage in practices of culinary tourism, both in their cities of residence, and overseas. However, she also cautions us to consider food practices within a ‘power-geometry’, and ask the following questions: ‘Whose foods and foodways are able to travel and under what conditions? Whose food encounters count as cosmopolitan, and whose culinary practices are denied such status?’ (2007: 82).

So, how can those of us with one or another kind of privilege be engaged in culinary practices that acknowledge similarities and differences, are mobilized locally as well as globally, and stretch to allow cultural openness? The answer may lie in opening conversations with those serving us pho, as well as those eating laksa on a budget.

In the Country of Crabb and Kebab

Unless you were living under a proverbial rock called commercial television in Australia these past few months, you are probably aware of the hullabaloo surrounding an episode of ABC's Kitchen Cabinet where journalist Annabel Crabb interviewed former immigration minister Scott Morrison. While this infamous televised encounter is no longer on iView, be assured that 'ScoMosas' (or Morrison's version of Sri Lankan samosas) has not only entered popular media lexicon in Australia, but has even inspired the ire of critical race theorists and independent media commentators.

Despite having a girl crush on Crabb's nifty desserts, 50s frocks, and penchant for witty political columns, I have to agree that the scorn is mostly well-deserved. While some are wary of the extreme lifestylisation of journalism, especially on a public broadcaster, this can remain ethical and balanced in the right hands. With the ScoMo episode, however, Crabb failed to scrutinise the former minister's repugnant decision to turn back Sri Lanka asylum seeker boats, especially in the context of the food he was cooking and serving her on the show. It was almost as though leftie intellectuals and Sri Lankan-Australians would be appeased by the kind gesture of ScoMo preparing curry and samosas, and stretching their imaginations to recognise these exotic culinary items as standing in for real brown people. Look hither, SBS executives and food writers - 'Making the Other' is a notch better than 'Eating the Other', especially when Annabel Crabb approves.

I won't be surprised if an ironic ScoMosa turns up in hipsterville Australia in the next month or so. For the rest of the nation though, Crabb's lack of scrutiny is not out of step with the understanding of the role of 'ethnic food' in establishing a multicultural society. In their work on food multiculturalism in Australia, Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan argue, 'There is a long history in Australia of concerted efforts to construct food as a medium through which people learn about other cultures and as a sign, when they eat diverse cultural foods, that their cities and regions are more tolerant of difference' (2012). These signs work at the level of official multiculturalism policy and pedagogy, as well as in everyday banal intercultural encounters. Given this, my quip is that we ought to see much more of the latter to disturb our middle class assumptions about multicultural food narratives as always, already triumphalist and engaged.

A Vietnamese-owned grocery store in Marrickville, NSW which is a site of many banal intercultural encounters

In the prelude to the summer holidays, SBS screened a three-part series called Kebab Kings that epitomises the various dimensions of what these everyday intercultural encounters over food can be. While the documentary was marketed as 'a bite of multicultural Australia', the twitter conversation is indicative of a wide-ranging audience that tuned in for the drunken conversations, and not just the incidental social commentary. The series also inspired its own kebab shop-specific hashtag, #kebabble, which continues to draw feedback on the show, and the featured shop-owners whose ethnicity and religion are a point of interest, yet not fetishised.

One of my favourite 'scenes' is when a Muslim worker at the Collingwood store describes the music of the Quran to his British customer. The latter is unfazed and compares his to genres he is familiar with. This real encounter did not give me the sort of warm fuzzy feelings typical of the 'aid an African child to feel good' genre, or the tearjerking invoked by wretched stories of war and conflict in 'other' places. I am not suggesting that these stories don't need to be told, but rather that they are not the only way of representing and encountering people who happen to hail from non-white cultures. With all its flaws, gathering around a kitchen table, whether in a television studio, a suburban house, or a kebab shop, gives us a pathway that we can reflexively employ to share stories. We must, however, try and do so with the understanding that there are narratives and feelings we can readily relate to, others we may habituate to, and still others that we will never fully comprehend or experience. Anyone up for dissing a ScoMosa at OzTurk this Saturday?

Coconuts and Bananas: Cosmopolitan or Deluded?

On Australia Day (which also happens to be India's Republic Day), I interviewed my friend, the maverick writer and radio presenter Sunil Badami for the cosmopolitanism project. He walked me through the main streets of the western Sydney suburb of Merrylands, where he narrated many a tale of growing up as a 'westie'. Sunil now lives in the hip inner western suburb of Rozelle with his wife and two daughters, and refers to himself as a 'coconut'. 'I'm brown on the outside, and white on the inside', he tells me, and adds that people's expectations notwithstanding, he cannot claim to take on any ethnicity-specifc speaking position.

As a resident of Sydney's inner west myself, I have often pondered over what makes me reluctant to move to the west, where the vast majority of those who share my ethnic descent live. I visit on a regular basis for the odd cultural festival, and to meet family and friends, but perhaps my own coconut-ness prevents me from looking at plots of land there, or spending a leisurely Sunday evening eating chaat in Harris Park and commenting on the outfits and general demeanour of fellow 'desis'.

 This sense of ethnicity-defined perception not matching everyday reality is also evident in the character of Simon Chan (played by Lawrence Leung), the artist son of a Vietnamese migrant shop owner who returns to the western Sydney suburb of Cabramatta in the new ABC2 series, 'Maximum Choppage'. While Simon is expected by his mother and the local Vietnamese community to be a warrior who will defend them against local thugs, all he wants to do is paint in peace. A scene that particularly struck me in the first episode was when Simon's mother knocks on his bedroom door, and he hastens to hide the canvas he is working on in his wardrobe. It made me wonder if this kind of 'closeting' of personal preferences and talents, often demanded by the older generation, the migrant community, and the wider society, makes one believe that one is not being Vietnamese enough, and hence being too white.

In a similar vein, the famous Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang speaks in his new film 'Bloodlinks', about growing up in an era that favoured assimilation, and consequently referring to himself as a 'banana' (that is, yellow on the outside and white on the inside). As an adult, Yang endeavoured to learn more about his Chinese heritage by studying the philosophy of Taoism, and withstood friends' jokes that he was a 'born again Chinese'. His story of moving from North Queensland to Brisbane, and finally finding 'his tribe' in Sydney was gripping and one I can somewhat relate to.

Still, I continue to feel that we are missing a nuance or two in referring to ourselves as coconuts and bananas. These names make for great satire, and even better, relatable storytelling. But perhaps the harder task is to realise that not everyone who lives in the inner city is white, and not all practices and lifestyles that revolve around caffeine consumption and social interaction around milk crates, sipping cider in a dingy bar while listening to an undiscovered band, and browsing through the contents of any shop that announces itself as retro or vintage are non-ethnic. I am not sure we have the vocabulary yet to talk about the vagabonds amongst us who take the road less travelled, and have to figure out whether polka dots and pearls look good on coconuts and bananas. 

Becoming Cosmopolitan - The Citizenship Ceremony for the 21st Century?

On the 29th of October 2014, no country was led into Tagore's 'Heaven of Freedom', but I did become a naturalised citizen of Australia. While desiring of this piece of paper for largely pragmatic reasons, I was also acutely aware of what my citizenship certificate and subsequently-granted passport meant in terms of my collusion in the dispossession of Aboriginal land. As a largely symbolic gesture, I decided to wear a scarf on my right wrist that had been designed by an Indigenous artist, and to later pose for a photo in front of the Aboriginal flag rather than the Southern Cross. I told myself that these black armbands were all I could manage under the circumstances, and hoped that this was an opportunity to ally with old and new Australians who continue to re-define Australian-ness and hold our political representatives to account in regards to our participation in the global civil society.

Photo Credit: Owen Leong

However, a few months on, in the wake of globally significant events such as the Sydney siege, the Peshawar school shootings, the Air Asia tragedy and the Charlie Hedbo attack, my questions regarding whether a cosmopolitan consciousness can co-exist with a locally-rooted identity (often understood through the lens of ethnicity or religion) have re-surfaced. During this time, I have also been tentatively putting together a new proposal for a sole-authored monograph on the subject of cosmopolitanism. In the course of reading philosophical, sociological, cultural studies and inter-disciplinary takes on the matter, I have realised that a sense of civic consciousness and being empathetic towards those different from us on account of colour or creed is in fact rooted in one's own personal histories and emotional geographies.

The generic association of cosmopolitanism in the popular imaginary with a kind of class privilege that bestows intellectual and aesthetic openness to other cultures does not tell the whole story. Then there those researchers who have argued for the existence of a kind of 'vernacular cosmopolitism' than may originate, for instance, in the not-so-privileged playground of a primary school in Western Sydney with kids from varied ethnic descents sharing the contents of their lunch boxes. This, in my view, is an important counter-henegmonic story to tell, but is again only part of the picture. I am interested in what happens to these children when they leave the western suburbs to go to a university closer to the city centre, and often share houses in locations such as the inner west of Sydney that are more readily associated with cosmopolitanism. Does this mean that we have those hailing from non-Anglo and working class backgrounds added to the pot of a relatively educated inner city mix? If so, how does this change the practice of being cosmopolitan and the spaces where it is practiced? Also, how do spatial and temporal movements (and the changes in dominant cultural phenomena that they entail) impact individual and collective affinities and cosmopolitan practices?

It is no secret that my own trajectory of being an international student in Australia from 2003 to 2010, a 'temporary' worker moving half-way across the continent for academic work in 2011, a permanent resident gaining a foothold in yet another new city in 2013, and then a citizen of late have impacted my own cultural and political association with the notion of cosmopolitanism. In previous years, I have more readily associated, both in my work and in my personal life, with the idea of being 'diasporic'. However, I now find that my points of cultural reference and emotional attachment are much more dispersed than implied by the term diaspora. These references and attachments don't just belong to India, where I was born and went to school, or to Adelaide, where I spent a formative chunk of my young adult life. In fact, they are both more specific and more widespread that those place names indicate. Growing up in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India meant an early initiation to ethnic strife and its impact on innocent people, while starting university in Adelaide the same year as the beginning of the Iraq invasion felt like a preordained beginning to the overarching themes and questions of my academic and creative routes thus far.

Similarly, I have come across many an international student turned 'skilled migrant', first-generation migrant turned returnee, second generation migrant turned expatriate in a third country, Indigenous Australian turned asylum seeker advocate, and many permutations and combinations located between the extremes conjured up by a white cosmopolitan man in an airport lounge, and a non-white woman in a kitchen, a temple, or a remote community. The purpose of my project, then, is to shed light on the 'cosmopolitan becomings' of people and groups whose stories are grossly under-represented or mis-represented in our popular media and culture. Such becomings may not fit the brief of an Australian tourism marketing campaign, but they may just be more indicative of the meaning of citizenship in the 21st century.

Is there any Joy in being an 'Ethnic Killjoy'?

An exhibit at the War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)

As I edge closer to (finally) attending my Australian citizenship ceremony later this month, I am wondering if a few pieces of paper will really allow me a greater sense of psychic belonging to this land. Perhaps after almost 12 years of being an outsider both in India and in Australia, I am simply looking forward to having a current address and a national identity that are somewhat congruent. But perhaps this inner outsider-ness is here to stay.

Perhaps this sense of looking in from the outside, this perpetual hybridity emerged much before the international migration experience. As a child of a Sikh family growing up in a largely Hindu city in a Muslim-majority state, and attending a Catholic school, I probably grew up with a greater ease with 'diversity' than similar-aged Anglo-Australians in the 1980s and 1990s. Still, not ever belonging to any semblance of a majority community or a numerically dominant ethno-linguistic group rendered me forever observant of what these inter-cultural interactions entailed. This is not unlike the Parsi girl in Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, 'Cracking Earth' who reflects on her insider-outsider status as India and Pakistan are being partitioned in 1947.

While there was no segregation in the school yard along religious or caste lines, I did wonder what impact the militancy in the state (Jammu and Kashmir) would have on our formative selves. The discord of our environment was most tangible for us when we witnessed a few bomb explosions at a stadium in the city where we were gathered to perform for the Indian Republic Day festivities. I don't recall us calling for a ban on the burqa, or otherwise ostracising our Muslim classmates. Yet, the recent flood in Kashmir has brought forth a tide of jingoistic nationalism and Islamophobia that I seldom associated with the place I grew up in. According to journalist Chirag Thakkar writing for Kafila, 'TRP-hungry television studios build a spectacle that is acutely wedded to a deep-rooted, pungent nationalism around catastrophe and relief in Kashmir'.

Perhaps I was indulging in a bout of diasporic nostalgia by romanticising my hybrid childhood experiences. But equally, it is likely that this inter-cultural utopia generated in the mind of a 10-year old that gave her a sense of belonging for the present and foreseeable future. It was accompanied by an implicit faith that most of her 'majority' and 'minority' comrades thought likewise. However, not being party to the last decade or so of neoliberal transformation and religious divisiveness in India has left me bewildered at the recent turn of events. Every other Facebook post on my news feed from a former school friend that implores the Muslim 'other' to glorify the rescue efforts of the army pushes me further away from this new essence of what it means to be India.

At the same time, the latest rhetoric about belonging to 'Team Australia' is alienating for me and a number of close friends and colleagues who do not share the same political beliefs as the current government. Yet, whenever I move out of this comfortable bubble (such as by tuning into the wrong radio station, or overhearing an uncomfortable conversation on the train), I am reminded of being on the fringes all over again. In a piece for the The Conversation late last year, I referred to this as being an 'ethnic killjoy' . There have been many occasions of late where my ethnic killjoy resilience has worn thin, and I have stayed quiet when I would have otherwise attempted to explain and elaborate. Perhaps I am adjusting to my officially bestowed Australian-ness and the killjoy will return once the citizenship pledge has been taken and recycled in the correct bin.

Who can Photograph Whom, and How: A Review of ‘Home: Photographs of ethnic communities’ by Louise Whelan

There was much criticism of the NSW State Library's panel titled 'Multiculturalism: What are we afraid of' in March this year. For instance, Professor Andrew Jakubowicz (Co-Director of the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre at UTS) wrote a piece in The Conversation equating the all-white composition of the panel to the gatekeepers of multicultural Australia. However, he didn’t review the photographs at the centre of this debate, or call into question the photographer’s ‘good intentions’. In yet another article critiquing the panel and the State Library, Sydney-based writer Ruby Hamad pointed out an image from the exhibition’s Facebook page, and its underlying caption to argue that ‘those of us from “different cultures” are not specimens to be dissected and discussed by Smart White People’. So what was it about this picture, the exhibition as a whole, and the artist’s statement that warrants us to pay more attention as viewers/witnesses?

The image that irks Hamad is that of four ‘Congolese’ children, seated on a bench, and looking bored at a wedding in Dapto in 2010. The Facebook description adds, ‘this just one of the many fantastic photographs that will take you into homes and urban environments of both refugees and migrants now calling Australia home’. While the photographer, Louise Whelan was purposely commissioned by the State Library to carry out the above, the results come across as 19^th century colonial anthropology rather than 21^st century inter-cultural ordinariness. Her artist’s statement duly acknowledges the intention to counteract negative media portrayals of migrants and refugees, but also complicates the counter-narrative by noting that she has been bearing witness to ‘assimilation’.

In a book titled Witnessing Australian Stories, Kelly Jean Butler writes, ‘Witnessing, thus, involves a double move: the need to witness to the other, while at the same time, witnessing to the self in the act of witnessing. In this way, witnessing is simultaneously a process of self-fashioning, of articulating different forms of selfhood, and of forging new kinds of communities among witnesses’.

Is it this self-witnessing that is missing when Whelan bears witness to ‘ethnic’ communities and takes photographs of them in their everyday settings? Is her inability to see and recognise the power relationships in operation what makes me uncomfortable and disaffected as a witness to these representational encounters? Is the sheer political and cultural imperative to see ‘ethnics’ as nothing but the other trying to emulate the self what reproduces and sanctions the logic of assimilation?

What if the children at the wedding in Dapto self-identify as Australian? What if the landmower is happy to be photographed by Whelan, but is an avid photographer, and would one day like their pictures own pictures of domesticity to hang in a prestigious gallery? What if the women dancing at the Hindu wedding really want to make a local film that captures all the dimensions of their lives, not just the South Asianness that they are required to put on display for the purpose of this photograph?

These are, of course, age-old questions about who can speak for whom (and how), especially when it comes to representing those on the margins of the cultural and political mainstream. There are lots of movements towards self-representation in the formal and informal community spaces of these margins. Scholars like Tanja Dreher, Chris Ho, and Juan Francisco Salazar, for instance, have written about migrant digital storytelling projects in western Sydney. On one level, one wonders why these self-represented stories rarely make it to spaces such as the State Library of New South Wales.

On another level, the imagined audience in these mainstream spaces has more power to act than those on the margins who are either testifying for someone like Whelan, or self-representing through a medium of their choosing. This presumably middle class, city-dwelling witness to the photographs can almost play the role of the adjudicator of the show, and has the option of taking their experience beyond the gallery through informal endeavours such as talking to friends, or more formal ones like political protest and lobbying. First, however, I/you/we have to develop the ability to self-witness and be critical of ways of seeing (and representing) that may be well-intentioned, but that are ultimately reducing the other to an artefact to be aesthetically consumed. Twenty-first century multiculturalism isn’t merely about celebrating the different colours and cultures inhabiting our cities and suburbs; it is also about finding better ways to relate to this diversity, of etching the face of the other in a universal patina with hues of individual/social difference.

You Think You are Making a Documentary, but the Documentary is Making You*

*This is the first in a series of monthly posts until I complete my new documentary project on ordinary, everyday practices of cosmopolitanism (hopefully by the end of 2015).

I thought I wanted to make a documentary about cosmopolitanism to re-jig my original youthful dreams of being a traveling creator, perhaps akin to a foreign correspondent. The reality of a demanding full-time job and other commitments has meant that my fantasies of exploration have moved to the streets and treasures of the cities I have resided in since becoming an adult (and there have been quite a few!). So this more realistic, adult version of travel is both about being a wandering tourist in one's own city (without the alienation and otherness often associated with tourism), and also a re-mapping of one's own life trajectory. I am only in the very early stages of this process, but have already begun to realise that my aspirations of world travel may have had less to do with disappearing, and may have been more about wanting to be found.

Last night at a party where I knew no one but the host, I hesitantly introduced myself as someone who had started to work on a new documentary on cosmopolitanism. I also unequivocally added that while the subject was infinitely interesting, I had yet to find a hook for the story. My fellow party-goers (all involved in creative endeavours of one kind of another) pitched ideas and offered suggestions that took me by pleasant surprise. An actress I talked to was of the opinion that being open to others, especially those from other cultures, was about being a certain kind of spiritual that transcended religion. Her partner, an introvert with a wide range of specialised interests said that cosmopolitanism to him meant blending into the crowds of a big city. He added that this suited those with temperaments similar to his own. A former actor and media diversity advocate didn't like the word 'cosmopolitan', and frankly told me that it sounded 'wanky'. He did, however, have a taken on being more worldly. As a half-Maori lover of chocolate and toast, for him it was food that helped migrants penetrate a society. I knew that food was powerful for invoking individual and collective memories, but also aware that it was a hackneyed and misunderstood metaphor when talking about contemporary Australian multiculturalism. We did, however, come to the conclusion that the pathways of food and what it said about a city/society at any given point of time was worth documenting.

I may end up using food (but not national cuisine) as the glue that holds my narrative together. What I am also interested in exploring now, as a result of these fortuitous conversations, is how personal histories and self-perceptions intersect with social conditions to make us more or less cosmopolitan. It is almost as though we bear witness to both our own growth, and that of our physical world to establish relationships with 'others'. These others may belong to a different group in the school, the workplace, the gym or the local shopping centre, but the cosmopolitan self is able to participate in an ethical encounter that is cognizant of similarities as well as differences. I am not suggesting that there is a personality type that is more pre-disposed to acting is such a manner. Most of us are fluid to a degree, and I would hope that what I uncover through the process of making this documentary is precisely what turns on the cosmopolitan switch for a wide range of (unlikely) people, and how they make it a part of their everyday relational practices. In the meantime, I will continue to look for the right cultural metaphor even as I wait to arrive into a state of balanced, adult selfhood.