Ien Ang

• Doctor of Philosophy Universty of Amsterdam
• Professor at Western Sydney University

‘Chinese Sydney’ has shifted away from its inner-city Chinatown towards new residential suburban concentrations with varied histories of progressive diversification. In some of these suburbs, where 40% or more of residents report Chinese heritage, older generations of diaspora Chinese intermingle with a substantial recent wave of China-born middle-...

This paper discusses how ideas of “race” and racial identification have, in different ways, been central in the construction of modern nation-states, both in East Asia and in postcolonial Southeast Asia, helping to entrench notions of racial difference as a fundamental element in nation-building. Processes of human racialization – and consequently,...

Artists and creative workers have long been recognized as playing an important role in gentrification, being often portrayed as forerunners of urban change and displacement in former industrial and working-class suburbs of 'post-Fordist' cities. However, as is well represented by recent research, the relationship between the arts, gentrification an...

The first Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in Tampere in 1996 was a momentous event for Cultural Studies in Europe. It was a bold intellectual intervention, taking place, perhaps not coincidentally, in a ‘small’, peripheral—at least geographically—part of Europe: Finland.

The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is not just a short-term public health emergency. Instead, it has laid bare a broader and deeper organic crisis, produced by the intrinsic tensions and contradictions of the hegemonic neoliberal capitalist order. I discuss this organic crisis in terms of its active amplification of human divisiveness at various levels –...

This article reflects on the state of cultural studies today. It asks to what extent cultural studies can move with the times, now that we live in a radically altered world dominated by global challenges such as climate change, the rise of China, and technological transformation. It points to the importance of focusing on cultural studies’ institut...

In the early twentieth century, Chinatowns in the West were ghettoes for Chinese immigrants who were marginalized and considered ‘other’ by the dominant society. In Western eyes, these areas were the no-go zones of the Oriental ‘other’. Now, more than a hundred years later, traditional Chinatowns still exist in some cities but their meaning and rol...

This report was commissioned to assist the Inner West Council in developing a greater understanding of the nature and extent of future needs for creative space in the local government area (LGA), with a focus on infrastructure for cultural creation and production. The research focuses on the relationships between artists, creators, their activities...

This research was commissioned to assist the City of Sydney in developing an up-to-date, wide-ranging understanding of its future needs for creative space, especially with regard to cultural creation and production. Most studies of creative space tend to focus on the material aspects of cultural venues and infrastructure, such as capacity, design o...

This paper explores the consequences of increasing ethnic diversity for practices of cultural consumption and the distribution of taste in Australia. Changing migration patterns and generational changes have produced a diversification of goods, sites and audiences, and an increasing transnationalization of practices and relations over several decad...

This reading of Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger highlights the connection between Hall’s unique intellectual voice with the historical specificity of his personal experience as a diasporic subject, growing up at the cusp of the moment of decolonisation, before the solidification of what we now call ‘identity politics’.

Chinatowns have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves that were despised by the dominant Western culture, while functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised world, the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they have become more open, hybrid and transnatio...

This response to Peggy Levitt’s book Artifacts and Allegiances argues that, as cultural institutions, museums are too deeply embedded within the nation state to be able to present cosmopolitan narratives that go beyond the biased particularities of the nation. Rather than conceiving nationalism and cosmopolitanism as a continuum, the relationship b...

This essay argues that the tension between 'ethnic' and 'national' identity is not contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state. Through an analysis of 'the Chinese' in 'Australia' it aims to demonstrate that seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national), multi...

Throughout his long career Stuart Hall has personified a shifting range of political-intellectual positionalities, responding to the changing historical conjuncture in the West since the late 1950s. From his engagement with the New Left to the generation of new spaces for critical intellectual intervention in the 1970s (as embodied by the Birmingha...

The field of cultural diplomacy, which looms large in present-day cultural policy and discourse, has been insufficiently analysed by the cultural disciplines. This special issue engages with the task of filling the gap. The present essay sets out the terms in which the authors have taken up this engagement, focusing principally on Australia and Asi...

It is widely recognised that the 21st century is seeing a geopolitical shift in global power relations towards Asia, particularly China. This has led Australia to officially embrace Asia as its regional home. But the neoliberal economic logic underpinning this embrace leads to a narrowly transactional conception of Australia’s relationship to Asia,...

http://www.acola.org.au/PDF/SAF03/SAF03%20SMART%20ENGAGEMENT%20WITH%20ASIA%20-%20FINAL%20lo%20res.pdf

The greater interconnectivity and interdependence unleashed by globalization are not creating a more harmonious, cosmopolitan humanity. On the contrary, the more global the world becomes, the more insistent particular differences, especially of the nationalist kind, are being articulated around the world, often leading to tension and conflict. This...

We live in transitional times, in which the weight of global power is markedly shifting towards Asia. In this context the meaning of the category ‘Asian’ is thoroughly in flux, negotiated and contested across multiple dimensions. In this light, is it possible, or even desirable, to speak about post-Asia? If so, what could it mean? Or is such talk p...

This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is not contingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state. Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national), multi...

'Critical Purchase in Neoliberal Times' is an edited conversation with Ien Ang and three members of the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective (CSPC): Miriam Bartha, Bruce Burgett, and Ron Krabill. The transcript of the conversation conducted at the University of Washington was reworked and revised by the interlocutors. The document as a whole surfaces...

The greater interconnectivity and interdependence unleashed by globalization are not creating a more harmonious, cosmopolitan humanity. On the contrary, the more global the world becomes, the more insistent particular differences, especially of the nationalist kind, are being articulated around the world, often leading to tension and conflict. This...

That the world is terribly complex is now a vital part of global cultural experience, a structure of feeling which has grown more pervasive in the 21st century. How do we find ways of navigating the complex challenges of our time? And what role can we, as cultural researchers, play in this task? Much humanities and social science scholarship in the...

In the coming decades, the balance of geopolitical power will shift from the West to Asia, especially China.1 Americans, who are used to their country's global superpower position, are waking up to the impact of a rising China on their lives, since the recent global financial crisis. In Australia, the significance not just of China, but of Asia, ha...

Review of Elizabeth Jacka ed., Continental Shift: Globalisation and Culture, Double Bay, Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 1992. pp.162. ISBN 0 949793 24 8 (pbk), $24.95.

In her 2009 Henry Mayer Lecture, presented in Brisbane in March, Ien Ang reflects on her own work on global and popular television cultures, spanning almost 25 years. In particular she traces the intellectual continuity from her first, classic book, Watching Dallas, published in 1985, to her last book, The SBS Story, published in 2008, from the poi...

The Internet has been a popular method for communication and collaboration across far-flung sites for some time, and its potential for enhancing participatory democracy has been much commented on. With the emergence of so-called Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005), the interactive and collaborative capabilities of the Internet have greatly increased, with sti...

Este artigo explora a mobilização de um conceito de ‘asiedade’ (‘Asianness’) dentro do contexto da emergência de uma indústria de TV por satélite, dominada pelo ocidente naquela região no início dos anos 90. Enquanto muitos governos asiáticos responderam às ansiedades resultantes dos desafios trazidos por este processo de globalização midiática pro...

The irresistible march of transnational media has given rise to widely experienced problems concerning cultural autonomy and identity. The research tradition of "cultural studies" offers a very appropriate and distinctive way of analysing these questions, especially by means of a critical ethnography of reception. The tendency in some recent recept...

In unserem Wunsch, Näheres über die Zuschauer zu erfahren, sind wir niemals ganz unvoreingenommen. Bestimmte Interessen und Einstellungen, materieller wie intellektueller Art, prägen gewöhnlich die Herangehensweise an die Definition unseres Studienobjektes. Ebenso bestimmen sie die Art der angestrebten Erkenntnisse, sowohl in Form und Inhalt, als a...

This article starts by looking back at the last twenty-five years, since the publication of Watching Dallas, to assess what has changed in television drama, and especially in relation to television serial drama, since 1985. The paper considers methodological questions involved in analysing how audiences make sense of television serial dramas as wel...

Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand so little about its nature...

National research policies are today driven by the concept of the ‘knowledge society’, in which development is deemed to follow the application of new ideas. Australia, like other countries, has encouraged partnerships between the universities and industry. This essay examines how Australian scholars in the humanities have responded to the Australi...

In unserem Wunsch, Näheres über die Zuschauer zu erfahren, sind wir niemals ganz unvoreingenommen. Bestimmte Interessen und Einstellungen, materieller wie intellektueller Art, prägen gewöhnlich die Herangehensweise an die Definition unseres Studienobjektes. Ebenso bestimmen sie die Art der angestrebten Erkenntnisse, sowohl in Form und Inhalt, als a...

Is, or should cultural studies be, a discipline or not? What exactly is its object? Should cultural studies be focused on influencing policy or be an agent of critique? What is the role of theory? What kind of theory? Should textual analysis or ethnography predominate? The regular reiteration of such questions reveals an ongoing sense of crisis, a...

Extract: The attitudes of many younger Australians from culturally diverse backgrounds reveal paradoxes about Australian multiculturalism today. This report, Connecting Diversity: Paradoxes of Multicultural Australia, sheds light on their views, experiences and expectations and the role of media in their lives.

This article discusses the role of different fundamentalisms in the dramatic escalation of the desire to 'de-Americanize' the global in the post-September 11 world. I argue that the line between fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist tendencies in world views is blurred, and that fundamentalism should not be dismissed as something totally alien from...

Mainstream cultural institutions such as museums are increasingly called upon to increase their accessibility to culturally diverse communities and audiences, including migrant groups who do not generally visit museums. This essay discusses the challenges experienced by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the largest art museum in Sydney, Australia...

This article reflects on the difficulties of practising cultural studies in a transnational, cross-cultural context by interrogating the popular metaphors of the 'crossroads' and the 'borderlands' as the spaces for trangression, heteroglossia and radical openness. The article argues that despite the increased intensity of communication and exchange...

This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of 'celebrating cultural diversity' and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of 'Asians' in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire...

This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of ‘celebrating cultural diversity’ and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of ‘Asians’ in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire...

This paper attempts to develop a critical transnationalist perspective in cultural studies from the localized cultural and political context of contemporary 'Australia'. It takes the Australian nation-state's current gee-economic and gee-political preoccupation with a so-called 'push into Asia) as a starting point for a questioning of dominant disc...

This article is a short response to Chen's critique of our article 'Asianing Australia: notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies'. It is argued that Chen's attack on our article is misdirected. Furthermore, we are in substantial agreement with Chen on many issues, most importantly that the nation-state should not be the uninterr...

This paper traces the symbolic significance of Singapore's policy of "multiracialism" by bringing it in connection with the city-state's postcolonial problematic of national identity. Against the currently dominant, nativist rhetoric which aims to construct Singapore as an authentically "Asian" nation diametrically opposed to its "Western" counterp...

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1. publ Bibliogr. na s. 186 - 199

The irresistible march of transnational media has given rise to widely experienced problems concerning cultural autonomy and identity. The research tradition of `cultural studies' offers a very appropriate and distinctive way of analysing these questions, especially by means of a critical ethnography of reception. The tendency in some recent recept...

This document analyzes and evaluates dilemmas and difficulties in developing/implementing "progressive television," a kind of television that seeks to transgress the boundaries of dominant (mainstream) television by proposing a new constellation of television production and consumption. The ideal is described as a television that tries to stimulate...