Ethnic Diversity and Identity Politics in Comparative Perspective
For News from Australia and the Pacific, we ask contributors to reflect on their own research and the broader academic field in Australia and the Pacific of which it is a part. Our contributions aim to give a select overview of Asia-related studies in Australia and beyond, and to highlight exciting intellectual debates on and with Asia. In the current edition, we focus on the theme of “Ethnic Diversity and Identity Politics in Comparative Perspective.”
Our authors discuss how the spaces for and discourses about ethnicity and ethnic diversity in various parts of the region are circumscribed by the identity politics of the state and majority groups. Dak Lhagyal explains how the Chinese government seeks to maintain a form of ‘pluralist-unity’ through a strategy of depoliticising ethnicity. Lewis Mayo analyses how non-Indigenous majorities in Taiwan both engage with and contest Indigenous Austronesian cultures, in ways similar to the identity politics of non-Indigenous majority groups in Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand. Both authors demonstrate the impact of these identity politics on the political, economic and socio-cultural marginalisation of Indigenous minority groups.
Edwin Jurriëns, Deputy Associate Dean International-Indonesia, The University of Melbourne. Email: edwin.jurriens@unimelb.edu.au
Cathy Harper, Editor of Melbourne Asia Review at the Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne. E-mail: catherine.harper1@unimelb.edu.au
The Depoliticising of Ethnicity in China
By Dak Lhagyal
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Austronesians and “Localism” in Taiwan, Hawaiʻi, and Aotearoa New Zealand
By Lewis Mayo
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