‘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.

1. Introduction

Debates about cultural appropriation within South Asian Australian kinship networks reveal a productive schism of feelings. First-generation South Asian Australian women are still invested in Australian multiculturalism and believe that ‘feeling’ Australian while desi1 is possible. Their second-generation daughters and/or granddaughters, however, have divested from the promises of the Australian multicultural project—and the negative affect ‘Indo chic’ incites within them reveals this in complicated, nuanced ways.

Affect theory posits that the personal is political, and the political is embodied. Scholars of affect argue for an affectual turn to social analyses as they account for how political truths are somatically felt. Lauren Berlant argues that affect theory is ‘another phase in the history of ideology theory that…brings us back to the encounter of what is sensed with what is known and what has impact in a new but also recognizable way’ (Berlant 2011, p. 53). Affect, therefore, helps us account for the links between discursive regimes of knowing and the bodies that internalise and act on these knowledges. As Donovan Schaefer articulates it, ‘Affect theory is about how systems of forces circulating within bodies—forces not necessarily subsumable or describable by language—interface with histories’ (Schaefer 2013, p. 2). In her recent book on affect and migration, Sukhmani Khorana argues that the affective turn is a fruitful way to excavate the truth of a social phenomenon, especially when one’s object of analysis is the lived experiences of marginal populations (such as migrants). She argues that given the role of emotions (such as fear) in eliciting nationalist sentiments and ‘contributing to recent global upsurge in populist nationalism and xenophobia’ (Khorana 2022, p. 4), feelings, emotions and affect) are therefore essential to any examination of what belonging or not belonging to a nation-state(s) could mean. I will use the terms ‘emotion’, ‘feeling/s’ and ‘affect’ throughout this article in the tradition of seminal affect scholar Elspeth Probyn, who uses emotion to refer to ‘cultural and social expression’ and affect as more ‘biological and physiological in nature’ (Probyn 2005, p. 11). The goal is to unpack embodied feelings (affects) and how these feelings are both informed by and taken up in public discourse (emotions, feelings) (Khorana 2022, p. 4).

The particular affects I will unpack in this article are borne of a cohort of South Asian Australian women’s encounters with the culturally appropriated trend ‘Indo chic’. Indo chic describes the inappropriate2 consumption of South Asian cultural artefacts by non-South Asian (or non-Desi) people, in particular, the wearing of traditional clothing, dance and food. Of interest to me is that these feelings take the same semiotic sign (Berger 2014)—the non-desi person consuming/wearing traditional South Asian cultural artefacts, re-coded as ‘Indo chic’—and extract from it a different signified. These semiotic differences seem to reflect one’s generational group.

In the past, I have written about how ‘Indo chic’ inspired participation in anti-racist online communities for many millennial and Gen-Z desi women (Nilsson 2022). The negative affect that Indo chic generated (emotions such as shame, anger, injustice, self-hatred, feeling different or excluded) for this generational cohort coincided with their status as second-generation desi people, many of whom were born and raised in the West. After reflecting on their emotions, many engaged in ‘call out’ or ‘shaming’ behaviours, both off and online, to discourage non-South Asian people from wearing it. There are many layers to their negative affect, and these layers point to structures and conditions of power that become individualised in conversations about cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation is often misunderstood as a critique of cultural exchange by both those who appropriate and within South Asian kinship networks. Cultural appropriation is a complex and controversial issue that refers to the act of adopting elements from a culture that is not one’s own, often without understanding the significance of those elements in their original cultural context. This can encompass various aspects, including fashion, art, language, food and practice (Corradini 2024). As explained by Corradini, ‘the issue with cultural appropriation lies in its potential to perpetuate stereotypes, marginalize certain groups, and appropriate cultural elements without proper understanding or context’ (Corradini 2024, p. 12). The term ‘Indo chic’ was first used by Virinder Kalra and Hutnyk (1998) to examine the links between the use of South Asian fashion and accessories in the West to older, orientalist tropes of a ‘mystic India’. They ascribe the term ‘Indo chic’ to a hybrid Western fashion trend that extracts specific elements of South Asian fashion, such as the bindi, tikka, or henna, and incorporates them with Western fashion staples. Kalra and Hutnyk (1998) analyse how Indo chic styles are predominantly marketed to and worn by people who are not South Asian and the ways in which they are seen as ‘fashionable’ on white bodies while read as ‘exotic’, ‘traditional’ or ‘unassimilated’ on the bodies of South Asian people in the West. Indo chic is therefore understood by many academics as cultural appropriation and, as Sunaina Maira and Pia Sahni argue, an example of ‘commodified racism’ (Mannur and Sahni 2011, p. 188).

The first-generation South Asian Australian women interviewed (and not interviewed—more on this later) for this article expressed positive affect towards the trend. First-generation South Asian Australian women were likely to feel emotions such as pride, curiosity and excitement when seeing a non-South Asian Australian consume their cultural artefacts and were baffled by the anger of their kin. Through researching the debate around cultural appropriation, I learnt that the debate about whether something was ‘cultural appropriation or cultural appreciation’ was a trojan horse in which people were talking about race, racism, white privilege and colonisation without directly doing so. In observing cultural appropriation debates in Australia in particular, I observed the way in which the particular character of Australian racism—the invisibility of white Australian settler privilege; the labelling of non-white Australians as ‘having (another) culture’; the insistence of a ‘colour blind Australia’ that is, at this contemporary moment, allegedly ‘post-racial’; and the behavioural expectations we have of migrants (such gratefulness, assimilation, ‘sharing’ of home culture with white Australians)—was articulated, without debaters explicitly discussing any of these awkward, unpleasant things.3

This article, therefore, will take the debate around cultural appropriation only as a jumping-off point for its enquiry—examining not the content of the debate itself beyond that which has already been expressed, instead focusing on the locus of the differing reactions to the debate from South Asian Australian women of different generations. These different reactions breed the following questions: Why do first and second-generation South Asian Australian women feel so differently about this issue? And what do these feelings tell us about the different somatic orientations of being South Asian in contemporary Australia? These questions point to the central affective tension that conversations about Indo chic conjure—the feeling of being ‘Australian’ or (not and) ‘South Asian’.

I will begin approaching these questions with an examination of the key theoretical interventions used in this article—that of ‘cruel optimism’ by Lauren Berlant and ‘the promise of happiness’ by Sara Ahmed. Following this will be a discussion of contemporary Australian multiculturalism and the role South Asian diasporas have played in the Australian multicultural project. An ensuing analysis of the responses from the series of ethnographic interviews detailed above will conclude this article.

2. Cruel Optimism and the Promise of Multicultural Happiness

The theoretical interventions at the centre of this article are Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Berlant 2011) and Sara Ahmed’s affective theorisations of the love of the nation-state and happiness (Ahmed 2014). Berlant and Ahmed have in common both a methodological approach and a similar object of analysis—happiness and hopefulness and how these affects are used politically. Both authors suggest that any analysis of power and ideology (Foucault 1990) must be supplemented with approaches from the affective turn, approaches that work to bridge political structures with what is somatically experienced by individuals. Berlant and Ahmed are interested in how happiness, pleasure, hope, and contentment are all promised to individuals through contemporary neoliberal logic and what happens to bodies when these promises are unfulfilled.

Berlant describes a ‘cruel optimism’ dynamic as one in which ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project’ (Berlant 2011, p. 1). It, therefore, describes one’s attachment to a ‘problematic object’ (Berlant 2007, p. 33) as an object that does not serve them or provide them with a positive affect beyond the desire of it. The optimistic pursuit of x is rendered cruel when achieving x is not beneficial or possible for the subject. Berlant introduces the role of affective projections of ‘the good life’, defined by any one subject, as the final objective of this pursuit. I argue that the attachment many migrants in Australia have to the promise of a truly multicultural existence is a relation of cruel optimism as a fair and equal, multicultural Australia does not (and may not ever) exist. Despite this, the cruel optimism of Australian multiculturalism, however, propels subjects forward. Berlant states that cruel optimism ‘provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living and to look forward to being in the world’ (Berlant 2011, p. 21). It is also a by-product of politics colliding with bodies, drawing those bodies forward through the promise of future happiness or attainment of ‘the good life’ (Schaefer 2013).

In policy and media, Australian multiculturalism is frequently framed as a promise. It is a promise to current Australians that new migrants, their experiences, skills and culture(s) will benefit the nation-state and, therefore, benefit individuals living within the nation-state. Australian multiculturalism is also promised to prospective migrants—that they may move here and live a safe and equitable life in Australia where they are not required to assimilate or abandon their traditional ways of life but instead be free to live in a new country made up of like migrants who live together in diverse accord. This is a promise for both parties of future happiness. Attachment to the Australian multicultural project then is an attachment to a problematic object. Attachment to the Australian nation-state is discursively framed as an important goal for all migrants, at once a love-object and the site of future happiness. Ahmed argues that through the promise of happiness, bodies are brought together by a shared expectation of future comfort. In the case of the multicultural nation, the glue that binds these bodies together is love of the nation and more precisely, love of the multicultural nation. Ahmed argues that ‘love becomes crucial to the promise of cohesion within multiculturalism; it becomes the ‘shared characteristic’ required to keep the nation together. The emotion becomes the object of the emotion... It is ‘love’, rather than history, culture or ethnicity that binds the multicultural nation together’ (Ahmed 2014, p. 131).

Ahmed goes on to argue that this ‘love’ is manifested in particular ways that require migrants to ‘give’ their difference to the nation, to mix with others, and this mixing is what will achieve the ideal multicultural state, the ‘good life’ for Indigenous, white settler, and migrant Australians alike (Ahmed 2014). In this way, the promise of (multicultural) happiness is ‘represented as a gift for the future generation …[but] at the same time the investment in multiculturalism becomes intensified given the failure of return: the multicultural nation is invested in the presence of others who breach the ideality of its return. They become the sign of disturbance, which allows the ideal to be sustained as an ideal in the first place; they ‘show’ the injury that follows from not approximating an ideal’ (Ahmed 2014, p. 139).

Responses from the first and second-generation South Asian Australian women in this study are both reflected in this passage from Ahmed. The first-generation respondents express investment in the future happiness of multiculturalism, invested in preparing ‘the gift for the future generation’ and, specifically, their kin. However, the demonstrably negative affect generated by cultural appropriation amongst the second-generation respondents illustrates that they are a disturbance, a breach, as they refuse to see multiculturalism as a ‘gift’ that has been given to them. Rather than endorsing cultural exchange and ‘giving’ their culture to non-desi people through the mechanics of cultural appropriation, they instead feel protective of their cultural artefacts and do not want non-desi people to consume them. By being upset by the non-desi consumption of South Asian culture, they fail to love the nation.

Ahmed posits that love works best when the object you love loves you back. However, the promise of future happiness, an affective hope, can sustain a subject’s attachment to an object that does not love them back (Ahmed 2014). The question then becomes, if the first generation concedes that the nation might not currently love them back (due to their own experiences of racism) but might in the future (a cruel optimism), why is the second generation suspect of the possibility of future reciprocation (no optimism)? I will return to this key question later in this article when I analyse the responses. To make this analysis intelligible, however, I must first sketch out a relevant (but brief) history of Australian multiculturalism and South Asian diasporas in Australia.

3. Australian Multiculturalism: Who Gets to Be Australian?

Aileen Moreton-Robinson posits that the Australian multicultural project began in 1788 when British colonial forces landed on Australian shores ‘claiming the land under the legal fiction of terra nullius4 [land belonging to no-one] and systematically dispossessing, murdering, raping, and incarcerating the original owners [of Australia, Indigenous Australians] on cattle stations, missions, and reserves’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 7). This original theft, dispossession and violence is the bedrock of the Australian nation-state, and its legacy tints every Australian life from 1788 to the present. Moreton-Robinson argues that contemporary Australia should be thought of as ‘post-colonising’ rather than the more socially sanctioned and oft-used ‘post-colonial’. She argues that Australia is ‘post-colonising’ as the occupation of Indigenous land is continued today by every non-Indigenous Australian—white settler Australian or non-white migrant.

This sense of ownership and authority manifested one way with the creation of the Immigration Act of 1901, one of the first bills passed before Australia’s newly formed parliament. This act made up a collection of legislation referred to as the ‘White Australia policy’, which was designed to restrict non-white people from immigrating to Australia. Australia’s proximity to Asia, as well as pre-1901 immigration from South-East, South and East Asia, was the motivation for the creation of this policy in part, as Ruth Balint accounts that ‘the seed of Asian invasion anxiety was sown in the earliest moments of Australian nationhood’ (Balint 2005, p. 33). Moreton-Robinson reiterates the consequences of such a founding fantasy, arguing that in contemporary Australia, ‘whiteness is the invisible measure of who can hold possession [and power]’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 9).

Literature about Australian race and indigeneity expands on the relation of non-white migrants and Indigenous Australians who are bound together as minoritised subjects in a white supremacist nation-state. Moreton-Robinson explains that non-white migrants’ sense of belonging is still tied to the fiction of terra nullius because their legal right to live in Australia is sanctioned by the colonial laws that enabled dispossession (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Therefore, the commonality of racialised oppression experienced by these two groups should not be overstated. While not the focus of this article, it is nevertheless vital to any analysis of racism towards non-white migrants in Australia to recognise that, while a marginalised group under white supremacist rule, they are still in the problematic and privileged position of the settler in post-colonising contemporary Australia.

White Australia policies slowly receded from late the 1940s when migrants from Southern Europe, previously banned from migration under the policy, were welcomed to Australian shores. Assimilationist immigration policies were officially inscribed until 1973 with the release of the report ‘A Multi-Cultural Society’ by the immigration minister A.J Grassby. At this point in history, Australians were asked to make a decisive ideological shift in their thinking for the first time away from a colonialist frame that privileged British (and other Western European) ways of life as civilised, moral, and ultimately superior to other cultural ways of being (Stratton 2016). Under multiculturalism, Australians were asked to consider that people from other cultures have equally moral and sophisticated ways of life and that Australia had the opportunity to play host to a revolutionary new society in which the heretofore dominant white settler Australian culture could co-exist happily and equally, with other cultural ways. Yet, as Fazal Rizvi argues, migrants today are still considered inferior as ‘most [white Australian] attempts to revise their thinking have at best been clumsy, with new practices of representation failing to make a decisive break from the residual racist expressions that had rendered Asians [in particular] as a homogenised mass, socially inept and culturally inferior’ (Rizvi 1988, p. 173). Therefore, the desired ideological shift has never quite manifested wholly to encompass all, or most, of Australian popular opinion.

Jaya Keaney argues that while nationalisms in more recently established settler nations such as Australia draw upon the past as symbols of nationhood, they are primarily oriented to the future promise of the nation (Keaney 2021). While this future orientation opens national identity up to precarity, it also allows Australia ‘to embrace multiculturalism as a project of national identity renewal’ (Keaney 2021, p. 170) with such significance that Khorana argues rises to the level of ‘[being] intertwined with the very notion of [contemporary] national identity in Australia’ (Khorana 2023, p. 245). However, Stratton warns that this does not mean that Australian national identity or ‘the Australian way of life’ is truly and equitably multicultural. Enquiries into what counts as an ‘Australian’ way of life are many and reveal a complexity that this article hopes to contribute to the excavation of. Any attempt to answer this must begin with an examination of the history of contemporary Australian national identity and the intentions of those who constructed it as contemporary Australian identity has its roots in British ethnosuperiority and, therefore, continues to prioritise the English language, the Christian religion and European cultural norms. It also continues to privilege white (appearing) bodies. Indigenous Australians were, therefore, inherently excluded from this condition of belonging, and as the British assumed control over who was and who was not allowed to move to Australia, they, too, decided which other bodies were allowed to belong to the nation. Since the boom of multiculturalist federal policy in the 1990s, a range of scholars (Ang 2005; Nicoll 2004; Soutphommasane 2013; as well as others) have described a new type of Australian racism where ‘culture’ superseded ‘race’ as the central disciplinary category of national belonging in Australian imaginaries. Alana Lentin argues that this gives rise to pronouncements of Australia’s multicultural success and a ‘colourblind’ state that is free of discrimination while continuing to reify belonging on the basis of integration within a national ‘cultural’ space that is Anglo-Celtic while misguided celebrations of a ‘post-racial’ Australia are made (Lentin 2020, p. 233).

Former race commissioner Tim Soutphommasane is one such scholar who has made such pronouncements in his 2013 book about the topic. A first-generation migrant to Australia himself, Soutphommasane argues that contemporary Australian multiculturalism, while imperfect, is actually working. He states that since the mid-1980s, Australian multiculturalism has given its migrants ‘the freedom to express one’s cultural identity and heritage’ (Soutphommasane 2013, p. 67) in a way that it has been formalised as a right of citizenship, a benefit unique to Australia. He makes the argument that ‘the integration of immigrants in Australia has been an overwhelming success. It is no mean feat that dramatic changes in the ethnic and cultural composition of Australia have taken place without widespread social disruption’ (Soutphommasane 2013, p. 67), citing ‘tolerance’ from white Australians towards migrants; the high performance of immigrants and their children in education and employment and the lack of a need to implement affirmative action policies in institutions as indicators. He further asserts that in contrast to other multicultural nations such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, ‘Australia has been a model of social harmony and stability’ (Soutphommasane 2013, p. 70), ultimately summing up that our multicultural policies ‘have provided a platform for immigrants and their children to succeed [in Australia]’ (Soutphommasane 2013, p. 70). This perspective is interesting as it is one that is reminiscent of those expressed by the first-generation respondents in this study. It is also one that reflects official government pronouncements about the successes of Australian multiculturalism.

The success of the Australian multicultural project is tested, however, when it approaches unhappy objects of racism such as the rise of explicit white supremacist political figures and parties such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the Cronulla race riots in 2005, the slew of attacks of Indian international students in 2009 and the ongoing number of Indigenous deaths in custody to name but a few. One of the most unhappy objects of Australian multiculturalism is the ongoing treatment of the ‘boat people’—asylum seekers who illegally immigrate to Australia by boat. Detailed analyses such as those by Martin (2015), Stratton (2006), Yeatman (2003) and others have examined the construction of ‘boat people’ in the minds of contemporary Australian imaginaries. A thorough examination of this issue is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is important to stress that public resentment toward these refugees is so profound that the existence of such sentiment alone challenges any claim of Australian multiculturalism’s success. Additionally, the resentment towards refugees as all ‘fresh off the [illegal] boat’ is directly expressed by second-generation respondents in this study (and in the title) as a contributing factor in their discomfort and fear of embodying cultural differences in public (white Australian) space.

Moreton-Robinson pinpoints that political rhetoric around refugees taps into ‘widely held fears among white Australians that the country is under threat from’ queue jumpers’ and terrorists among the refugees from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan” (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 8). Consequently, these refugees are placed in offshore detention centres alongside asylum seekers from other parts of the world (most of whom hail from Asia) in camps under conditions that many, including the United Nations, have argued are in breach of international law (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Refugees represent, therefore, for some white Australians, the ‘bad actors’ Ahmed refers to who threaten national unity. Through their choice to enter Australia illegally and ‘jump the queue’, they ostensibly pose a threat to the harmony of the well-functioning Australian multicultural project.

However, their presence in Australia bolsters the stated aims of multiculturalism through increased diversity and acceptance, and what they really threaten, Hage suggests, is white Australian dominance. Hage’s research reveals that in Australia, ‘that both White racists [the assimilationists] and White multiculturalists share in a conception of themselves as nationalists and of the nation as a space structured around a White culture, where Aboriginal people and non-White ‘ethnics’ are merely national objects to be moved or removed according to a White national will’ (Hage 1998, p. 17). Similarly, Stratton points to the structure of Australian multiculturalism to evidence a similar conclusion, arguing that Australian multiculturalism ‘works with a core and periphery structure. The core is Anglo-Celtic culture which is primarily middle class with a large working-class component. The periphery is composed of those described in terms of ethnic and racial difference but thought of in terms of cultural diversity’. Hage argues that this structure is rendered invisible and has managed to sustain itself for a long period of time ‘because it constantly finds empirical validations of its main components in everyday life’ (Hage 1998, p. 19) manifested in the vaguely defined, yet exalted and aspirational ‘Australian way of life’.

4. South Asian Diasporas in Australia: A (Very) Brief History

South Asian people have lived in Australia since the foundation of the first colony, with some scholars arguing that a few South Asian men were amongst the first convict populations. Sojourners from South Asia entered Australia during the first half of the nineteenth century, working as camel drivers, hawkers and labourers and some established South Asian communities in Australia. As an effect of the White Australia policy coming into place in 1901, there was a pause on South Asian immigration until the 1960s when a provision was introduced to allow entry to ‘people of mixed origins’ including members of mestiza populations in regions such as East, South-East and East Asia, as well as some South American mixed populations. However, the attitude of white Australians at the time was reflected in domestic policy that required migrants to assimilate to an ‘Australian way of life’ (Ang 2009) upon moving to the country. Assimilation required migrants to speak only English, practice Christianity, eat primarily British food, wear Western clothing and otherwise mimic the ways of life of white Australians. ‘Good migrants’ were well-assimilated migrants, and ‘bad migrants’ were those who continued to practice their Otherness. While the policies were never officially abolished, the creation of the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 made it illegal to discriminate against people due to their race, effectively ending the last traces of the policy. Ien Ang argues that the end of the White Australia policy in the 1970s was ‘a matter of strategic government decision-making rather than a reflection of national popular conviction’ (Ang 2009, p. 119) as Australia was under pressure from the global north to end its discriminatory migration policies, which were considered outdated.

The 1970s migration boom is categorised through its focus on skilled migration, with doctors, teachers and other professionals encouraged to migrate to Australia to address a skills shortage in the country. Since the late 1970s, Australia’s South Asian diaspora has grown to one of the nation’s largest, with the 2021 census revealing that one in five Australian citizens was born in India (Khorana 2023). Tertiary education students from South Asia have come to comprise a significant percentage of the South Asian diaspora in recent decades, with more student migrants from nations such as Nepal and Bhutan joining the already established national diasporas of Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani Australians.

Stratton argues that Asian Australians, including South Asian Australians, have benefitted from a conception of themselves as a ‘model minority’, being granted ‘honorary whiteness’ within Australian society for how well they assimilate and practice the ‘Australian way of life’ (Stratton 2009). Khorana, amongst others, has argued that South Asian Australian diasporas, in particular, have occupied various symbolic positions within the mainstream Australian imaginary from the end of the white Australia period (Khorana 2014). In the late twentieth century, South Asian cultural forms and images began to enter the popular Australian imaginary ‘with Bollywood parties, curries on pub menus and with the sheer visibility of Indians serving in supermarkets and driving city cabs’ (Khorana 2014, p. 9). During this period and before 9/11, the ‘liberal media’s new racism discourse’ rearticulated the ideology of ‘multicultural Australia’ through the selection of assimilationist Indian migrant perspectives for mainstream stories. What emerges from the media coverage of this era is a curated selection of assimilated, middle-class Indian Australian voices whose views echo government rhetoric about the success of multiculturalism. The stories of these members of the Indian Australian diaspora mirror, most importantly, institutional denial of racism in Australia as they lean in and embrace the role of the model minority articulated by Stratton (Khorana 2014).

In the years following 9/11, however, South Asian Australians—both Muslim and non-Muslim—became the victims of Islamophobic rhetoric, and historical Australian xenophobia and distrust of Asian migrants was once again revived to represent mainstream opinion. In May 2009, a string of news stories began to appear first in Indian media and then in the Australian media about Islamophobic attacks targeting Indian students in parts of Melbourne and Sydney. These attacks resulted in the deaths of 32 South Asian Australian students whose deaths were characterised in much of the Australian media as a result of being ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’ rather than a result of targeted hate crimes (Khorana 2014, p. 260). This assertion that the series of attacks were not rooted in anti-Indian racism undermined the victims’ statements of the attacks, who reported with certainty that they were racially motivated. They also blamed the victims by noting that they were in ‘dangerous’ areas of Melbourne ‘after dark’, therefore putting themselves in harm’s way (Indelicato 2017).

This violence, and the way the Australian press covered it, stirred controversy within Australia’s South Asian diasporas. Those who were proud of the status of the South Asian as a ‘model minority’ (representing a majority of South Asian Australians who were ‘staying under the radar and avoiding controversy’) actively voiced their concerns about the student attacks across a range of public forums for the first time (Khorana 2014, p. 12). The Indian Australian community, therefore, jeopardised the ‘honorary whiteness’ (Stratton 2009) that they were afforded as a ‘model minority’ by publicly expressing their anger towards and disappointment in the mainstream Australian public for their interpretation of the attacks. The 2009 hate crimes against international Indian students led to the emergence of contemporary South Asian Australian political consciousness both amongst young international students who encountered racist violence at a bodily level and amongst members of the established Indian Australian diaspora.

This moment was vindicating for South Asians in Australians who did not espouse assimilationist rhetoric and self-identify as a ‘model minority’ or ‘honorary white’ as it showcased their experiences of racism in contemporary Australia to the outside world. This moment of political consciousness tacitly informs the period of activism I explore here, triggered by the popularity of Indo chic from 2012 onwards.

South Asian Australians, then, currently exist as a paradox in the mainstream national imaginary—at once a model minority and a national threat. This positioning reveals that their belonging to the nation is conditional, dependent on how they relate to the nation and how effectively they endorse and uphold white multiculturalism (Hage 1998). This background informs the conversations that were emerging in South Asian Australian kinship networks with the rise of the fashion trend Indo chic.

5. The Study

The responses that this article draws from are from an archive of qualitative ethnographic interviews that took place in various capital cities of Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane) in 2018. These interviews were conducted with a group of South Asian Australian (n = 12) women between the ages of 19 and 76. Most of this cohort (n = 8) are second-generation Australians and, therefore, born in Australia, and most (n = 9) are from the generational groups categorised as ‘Gen Z’ (born 1997–2021) or ‘Millennial’ (born 1981–1996). As such, most of the respondents are second-generation, young South Asian Australian women with parents who had migrated to Australia as adults. The remainder (n = 4) were born and lived in South Asia and moved to Australia later in life and were from ‘Generation X’ (1965–1980) or ‘Boomer’ (1946–1954) generations. In-depth, one-on-one, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the respondents (whose names here have been anonymised) over an hour.

I did request my respondents ask their female family members to also be interviewed as a group; however, only one respondent was able to manifest this. When my participants said they had asked their family members to join, many said that their kin did not have the time to do the interview, and some did not have an interest in doing so. This reinforced my hypothesis that Indo chic had the most impact on young South Asian Australian women, as Gen-Z respondent Korine articulated, “I was so excited to meet you and have this conversation I was like ‘Yes I’m mad! Let’s go! I’ve got something to say!”

The responses I quote in this article are a part of this larger study and focus on the responses to only one question of the ten asked. That question is, ‘How do you feel about Indo chic and, if you know, how do your female relatives feel about it?’ Three parts of this question are significant to the resulting responses. The first is that the question asks directly about affect—how the trend makes them feel rather than asking about their knowledge or opinions on it. Second, the question links their feelings to the feelings of other members of their family. Therefore, there is an impreciseness to the data about how the family members of the respondents feel as if they cannot speak for themselves. This impreciseness, however, is by design. The retelling of the feelings of another is productive as it casts a wider net of affect to encapsulate not only how the respondent feels about Indo chic but how the respondent feels about their relatives’ feelings about Indo chic. My central research interest is this dialectic between their feelings and the feelings of their family members as it reveals findings beyond the issue of Indo chic. Third, the question makes gender explicit. Gender is historically significant to this question.

While some South Asian cultural artefacts such as Dastar and Kurtha suits have been critiqued online when worn by non-South Asian men going to costume parties, the vast majority of critiques of Indo chic are centred around South Asian clothing and accessories that are the traditional purview of women—bindi, mehndi, tikka, sari, salwar kameez etc. Additionally, as Emma Tarlo (1996) argues, symbols of South Asian femininity as manifest through dress have significance to South Asian national identities more than that of South Asian men. Under British rule, South Asian men were encouraged to wear Western-style suits to signify professionalism and embrace the British ways of life. South Asian women, too, experimented with hybridised versions of Western dress. However, these hybridised dress practices were soon discouraged by the Indian nation-state. Indian women were then entrusted with the responsibility of retaining ‘pure’ Indian culture (Tarlo 1996, p. 46). Women embodied the ‘real’ India, whereas men were able to use Western dress as a tool to demonstrate social mobility (Chatterjee 1993). This history foregrounds the contemporary relationship and the sense of ownership that South Asian women, in particular, have over their traditional dress, which in turn informs how they respond to Indo chic. The results that follow below are arranged into three key themes: ‘Interpellated as brown’, ‘I’m not a recent migrant’ and ‘My mum doesn’t get it’.

6. Results One: Interpellated as Brown

“I mean I went to school with a majority of white people. There wasn’t a day where I did not feel different” said Asha*, a 20-year-old woman of Pakistani heritage but who was born in Australia. Asha felt that this was important to note before telling me how Indo chic made her feel and before she recounted to me that she had previously had arguments with her mother over whether Indo chic is cultural appropriation or cultural exchange. She continued:

Even if it was a good thing. Like my lunches, my friends always wanted to eat some of my lunch because it was delicious. They thought it was amazing, but it was never the same as them. For the longest time I was trying so hard to fit in with them, but now I’m like you know what? It’s fine, I’ll do what I want whether you like it or not, it doesn’t matter.

Asha explained that she came to this conclusion after engaging in discourse about Indo chic online. In response to the popularisation of Indo chic, South Asian diasporic women from around the world began posting images of themselves on social media under the hashtag #reclaimthebindi (see Nilsson 2022), and Asha was one of these women. Asha here is linking her feelings about Indo chic with distinct feelings of Otherness, Otherness which, even if positioned as a positive thing, generated a lasting bad affect for her. With this response, Asha complicates the vision of Australian multiculturalism while also hinting at the expectations of migrants in Australia. Multicultural Australia says to its migrants, ‘share your culture with others, and it will be well received’ (Ahmed 2014). In Asha’s case, this is true; however, this demand to embody and share her ‘culture’ has resulted in lasting feelings of difference and of not belonging due to her race. Sukhmani Khorana has used the idea of ‘belonging’ rather than ‘identity’ to explore how Australian migrants understand their own national and cultural backgrounds. She argues that belonging is both a feeling and a set of practices, and ‘it would be useful to consider how ethical and political implications change when we see ‘belonging’ as referring to an event or an everyday encounter. This then becomes a feeling that is not predetermined but one that comes into being through affective encounters, and acting in responsive ways’ (Khorana 2022, p. 96). Therefore, the productivity of moments such that, as described by Asha above intensifies. Khorana argues that theorising belonging-as-affect is agency endowing to migrants as it enables them ‘to feel and articulate their own identity, instead of being at the receiving end of the language of objectification often employed by state policies and mainstream media discourses [in Australia]’ (Khorana 2022, p. 97). In this way, then, the feeling of belonging is seen to be an affect that is generated in a relational milieu and ‘is most effective when there is a high degree of reciprocity’ (Khorana 2022, p. 100). When second-generation Australians, the children of migrants, therefore, are interpellated as not belonging, despite their Australian nationality and a lifetime of living in Australia, they feel as if they do not belong to the category of ‘Australian’. Twenty-three-year-old Indian Australian Vina* articulates how this feeling of not belonging is somatically experienced. She explains that her body betrays her in (white) public space as she knows she is being read as Other, as not Australian, as something else. Indo chic aggravated that feeling for her. Seeing non-South Asian people comfortably wear the same clothes and accessories she avoids for fear they amplify her Otherness and give people more of a reason to ‘stare’ and ‘say things about’ her made her feel upset. She explains:

My mum might wear the bindi and stuff casually if she’s going out with her friends. I won’t. Besides my own personal insecurities, it’s also the fact that people look. I don’t want to add to that by wearing Indian dress because it gives them more of a reason to look and talk. I really don’t want to give them more of a reason to look at me more than I consent to, which is basically why I don’t wear it [traditional dress].

When I asked to clarify who she was talking about when she referred to ‘them’, she replied, “Everyone. But mostly old white people”. Vina is pointing to the importance of reciprocation here and how the white gaze is configured in the reciprocity of belonging. In Black Skin/White Masks, Franz Fanon describes his first encounter with the white gaze as one in which his consciousness as a Black man was split into three. Fanon’s travels to France from Martinique inspires his theory. He explains that: ‘In the white world the man of colour encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person’ (Fanon 2023, p. 81). His own image of himself is split when he is objectified by the white gaze, and he becomes aware now of how he is perceived by the white society he finds himself in. This (negative) perception of himself as a Black man is now incorporated into his sense of self-understanding, hovering in an uncomfortable mix. Rather than experiencing Fanon’s shock at how he is perceived in France, Vina knows how she will be perceived as she was born and raised in Australia and like Asha, has felt othered by a mainstream white gaze throughout her life. The influence of the white gaze was also acknowledged by the first-generation respondents, but its influence was articulated in distinct ways. Fifty-six-year-old respondent Viola*, who moved to Australia from India in her late 20s, said she did not often wear traditional dress in Australia but was having trouble articulating exactly why that was. She said:

I always wore bindi with saris, but when I was younger in my twenties and early thirties. I travel back to India too and get henna done. But I’m a university lecturer and I don’t like wearing it [traditional dress] to class. I always thought it’s a bit…I used to feel a bit…different or… I don’t know. Especially when I got into my thirties, I felt the need to be more professional. So, I must admit I felt the drive more to fit in [in Australia] and have a more transferable style but I still have a sense of cultural style and want my daughters to wear it [traditional dress] more.

Viola’s struggle with articulating what influences her understanding of traditional Indian dress as ‘less’ or ‘unprofessional’ in an Australian workplace is interesting. The mainstream Australian gaze is hailed here (‘in class, at work’) but not fully recognised as the reason Viola felt ‘the drive to fit in’—in stark contrast to the second-generation respondents, who felt comfortable pinpointing the white gaze as the reason for the bad feelings generated when wearing traditional dress in Australia. Viola here explains a process whereby the white gaze had a similar effect on her to that of her daughters (discomfort, perhaps shame), and she chose to mitigate that by changing her style to be more ‘transferable style’ (Western style) in the Australian setting with the goal of ‘fitting in’ (assimilation). Twenty-five-year-old Nepalese and Indian Australian Rena* also described her first experience of Indo chic as a reveal of sorts. She described the first time she saw South Asian cultural artefacts being adopted by mainstream Western media when the American pop group The Pussycat Dolls released their music video for ‘Jai Ho’ in 2008. She explains:

I remember in my mid-teens I watched Jai Ho and felt embarrassed, like, why would you? Jai Ho doesn’t mean what you guys think it means so I don’t know why you are saying it. Also, like, this is something I want to keep completely separate from the rest of the world. Knowing you have gone and made a music video about it you are exposing me and making me feel so vulnerable and I hated that.

Twenty-six-year-old Anglo-Indian Australian Jasmine* articulated the popularity of the trend in a similar way. She said, “I guess [Indo chic] feels traumatic in a really every day, banal way. It’s almost like feeling hailed as or realizing that you are brown and [therefore] being ripped from the social fabric [of Australia] a little bit.” She explained that she does not wear traditional dress outside of South Asian settings such as going to the temple with her Indian mother. She doesn’t “wear Indian clothes to uni or a party [typical places where Indo chic was worn by non-desi people] because I would feel really surveilled”, echoing the feeling articulated earlier by Vina about the impact of the white gaze.

I think understanding this affect as a manifestation of shame offers us a part of the answer, but it is not only shame that they are feeling. Elspeth Probyn argues that ‘when one feels shame, it is a profound intra-subjective moment that has the capacity to undo something of the person—that provokes a deep psychic emotional disturbance which is productive in every sense. Feeling shame produces a new sense of self even if it is only momentary; it produces a profound reflection on the self’ (Probyn 2005, p. 325). Second-generation Australians in diasporic communities of colour feel a profound affective attachment to their identity as Australians (Hage 1998), which is in line with the promises of Australian multiculturalism. Stratton argues that in Australia, ‘culture’ has become the stand-in for ‘race’ and that a person ‘having a culture’ is something that is applied to some bodies (racialised bodies) but not others (Stratton 2009). In this way, white bodies are able to claim Australian-ness (i.e., no culture as it is the dominant and invisible culture) with tacit and automatic ease, whereas the bodies of non-white Australians are always in the process of being located as ‘from elsewhere’. All the above respondents are officially, by birth and nationality, Australian. However, the shame conjured by the Indo chic encounter propels them into a new ‘sense of self’ (Probyn 2005), which, even if temporary, demarcates their cultural (and therefore national) difference as distinct and irreconcilable from that of what they know themselves to be—Australian.

Fifty-six-year-old Tami’s response to this question also began with a caveat “Growing up we were English speaking, Western clothes-wearing and Christian. The same as everyone else, but brown”. Tami moved to Australia at five years old in the late 1960s and identifies as Anglo-Indian. Tami’s racial difference was astutely felt in 1960s Australia, which at the time had just amended the White Australia policy to let people of mixed origins, such as herself, in. Tami shared that she thought Indo chic “was weird” and that she had seen the style become popular in the late 1990s, too. She did not, however, feel the shame or other negative affect the Millennial and Gen-Z respondents reported despite growing up in Australia. She explained, “maybe it’s because I don’t feel as connected to Indian culture. We are just Anglo Indian and live our lives in Australia and just go on about our business”. This statement reflects findings from research about this particular generational cohort of South Asian Australian communities who lean into their status as ‘Good Migrants’ who assimilate peacefully into the ‘Australian way of life’ (Stratton 2016). Tami articulates an ideal of the model minority when she describes her family as ‘the same as everyone else but brown’. Tami’s response, while espousing a model minority myth, still undermines the promises of a multicultural nation-state as colour-blind through her emphasis on being “the same—just brown”. However, all these responses demonstrate that, despite institutional and individual assertions, contemporary Australia is not colour-blind. The invisibility of Australian whiteness is exposed here, too, as ‘everyone else’ is raceless and, therefore, tacitly, the dominant white Australian through which every other ethnicity is positioned against in the multicultural state. Gen X Tami is optimistic in her understanding of her family as ‘the same as everyone else’. Some of this belief might come from Tami’s mother, 74-year-old Victoria* also expressed hallmark attitudes of the ‘model minority’ in her response but with more of an assimilationist edge. On wearing traditional dress, Victoria responded that:

There’s not really been any time I felt different in Australia for wearing Indian clothes. I got in more trouble with Australians for talking about India than dressing like an Indian. But you know I realized I was young and I was probably overdoing the chat about India so I stopped talking about it. So the last time I wore any Indian clothing was probably 1969 or in the 1970s. I haven’t worn it since then. I did not marry an Indian so there wasn’t really the occasion because I didn’t mix in circles that required me to wear it. Actually, I tell a lie I went to a party about 5 years ago where you had to wear ‘national dress’ and that’s when I last wore it.

Victoria moved to Australia in her early twenties and, shortly after arriving, married a white Australian man. She explains that she ‘didn’t marry an Indian’ and ‘didn’t mix in circles’ where wearing traditional dress was ‘required’, indicating a held belief that traditional dress belongs not in mainstream Australian society (of which she is a part) but in only certain parts of Australian society (here hinted at as Indian diasporic places). She also articulates ‘getting in trouble with Australians’, which could be read as an admission of experiences of racism. Victoria ties those more to ‘talking about India’ rather than wearing traditional dress; however, by her own admission, she has not worn traditional dress in Australia since the 1970s, with the exception of a ‘national dress’ costume party. Victoria could be read as a ‘good migrant’ who has assimilated to an ‘Australian way of life’ by detaching herself from symbols of her Indian cultural lineage. While Victoria does not express optimism in the multicultural project here (beyond her attendance at a hallmark of multiculturalism—the ‘national dress’ costume party), her intentional choices to distance herself from her cultural difference (wearing Indian clothes, talking about India) express practices of assimilation that were exalted by the Australian government at the time of her migration (the 1960s).

7. Results Two: I’m Not a Recent Migrant, I’m Aussie

Central to cultural appropriation critiques of Indo chic are these personal stories of young, second-generation diasporic South Asian women who had experienced, as they saw it, racial othering at the hands of Indo chic items such as the bindi. Indo chic items, many said, were something that they wore in childhood and were ridiculed and othered by their (mostly white) peers for wearing such items. The Indo chic item, therefore, developed a negative affect distinct from that of its significance in their family and the wider South Asian community in which they were located. My participants echoed this, sharing that while wearing traditional dress, they felt that their capacity to be perceived as Australian by other Australians suffered. Asha articulated this most astutely when she explained:

[when I wear traditional dress] I feel so uncomfortable, like everyone is looking at me and like I’m standing out. Also, there is this issue where I think people are thinking I look like I’m FOB [a shorthand for ‘fresh off the boat’, an illegal refugee]. That has always been an issue for me, I don’t want to look too ‘FOB’ you know? I know it’s not a good mindset to have but in the back of my mind I don’t want to look like a recent migrant. I mean I want to be kind of seen as Australian because that’s what I am.

Asha here is explaining how her hybridised Australian Pakistani identity is undermined when she wears traditional dress and expresses concern at being interpreted as a recent migrant or refugee, groups which are historically maligned by the Australian multicultural state as ‘Bad Migrants’. Asha fears being seen as a migrant at all, as she is Australian. Indo chic, therefore, conjures up these bad feelings for her and generates more bad feelings through feeling bad about it (e.g., “I know it’s not a good mindset to have”). Asha is not alone in feeling complex and interconnected emotions about Indo chic. For those respondents who used fashion as a form of self-expression, traditional dress signalled to the outside world that they were ‘too South Asian’, or ‘more South Asian’ than they felt. Visually appearing ‘too’ or ‘more’ South Asian exposed them as a racial Other to the white gaze, making them more vulnerable to racist othering.

Korine*, who is 19 and of Indian heritage, was born in Australia and told me that her relationship with ‘anything Indian’ has changed over time. She said, “I remember I used to actively stay away from anything Indian because I used to try to distance myself from it. Like, I used to want to change my name because it sounded too Indian, and my name isn’t really even that Indian but now I’ve realised that it is nothing to be ashamed of”. Jasmine experienced a similar journey and mentioned that movements like #reclaimthebindi in response to Indo chic made her feel “okay to look more ethnic or more desi than I used to feel comfortable looking” sharing that “When I was little, it was something I used to avoid because I didn’t want to look more Indian or too brown so I used to play it down because I felt like there was something a bit gross or something I didn’t want to be”. There is an interesting element to these recollections. They point to the generational divide within South Asian Australian kinship networks when it comes to Indo chic. All these responses reflect on the past tense, their younger years and childhoods, as significant to their current state of embracing their South Asian-ness as young adults.

The question then is, what is it about Australian multiculturalism that makes the children of migrants feel like they are in danger of losing their Australian-ness when they engage with their cultural background in public, even when they are born in Australia and have never lived (or even visited) in their ancestral homeland? The answer to this question is complex but can be condensed to the continuing dominance of white Australians as the ‘arbiters of national will’ (Hage 1998). The central thesis of Hages White Nation is that ‘white Anglo-Saxon culture prevails in Australia and ‘is imbued with a tradition of ‘tolerance’ and ‘cultural pluralism’. Unless it opens up to the decentralising effect of migration and globalisation have had on the status of whiteness [that is, a reducing of the power of Australian whiteness], it is unable to provide such a new politics [of an equitable multicultural society] because it is itself built on the negation of this loss’ (Hage 1998, p. 26). Australian multiculturalism, therefore, is a cruel optimism, as some Australians are interpellated as ‘Australian’, while other Australians, like my participants, are not.

8. Results Three: My Mum Doesn’t Get It

About halfway through answering the question about Indo chic and feelings, Indian Australian respondent Sab* reflected on the conversations she had had with her family members about Indo chic. She said:

It [the conversation and ensuing fight] was sad but beautiful because it hit me that my family members can see it [Indo chic] and find their culture again. But, like, you or me, we didn’t get the choice. Our parents moved here and we are still disconnected from India as a place. I want to connect to it [India] too because for so long I felt like I was missing out on something, you know?

Sab, like many of the respondents, was born and raised in Australia and had never lived in South Asia. The articulation of the second generation as ‘not having a choice’ felt particularly poignant considering the retellings of racist events in childhood the respondents shared with me. In this context, choosing not to be the ‘good migrant’, choosing not to ‘love’ the Australian nation-state through rejecting assimilation and refusing cultural sharing feel like an act of political agency that undermines the power of Australian racism. This choice also flies in the face of the optimism of their first-generation kin, who, fuelled by good affect, chose to move to Australia to lead the peaceful multicultural lives they were promised. Indeed, those South Asian migrants who moved to Australia under skilled migration programmes are seen as ‘rational actors who do so for better work and/or lifestyle opportunities for themselves and their offspring’ (Khorana 2022, p. 1), demonstrating their ‘good migrant’ status. However, this generation’s kin was subjected to othering and racism and felt they did not belong in this nation that welcomed and applauded their parents for choosing to migrate here.

Jana*, a Sri Lankan/Indian, second-generation Australian, touched on this saying: “how our parents view racism is so different from the way that we view racism. They dealt with so many issues when they immigrated out of their homeland and for them it [Indo chic] is like an acceptance of the people who have accepted them, if that makes sense?” Rena went on to talk about how her parents do not engage with Australian society the way she and her siblings do:

For example, my parents have never gone to school here, they’ve only worked here, and they’ve grown up going to weddings and wearing traditional clothes and speaking in their language and that’s such a fundamental part of them from day one. We have had to battle with that verses being a ‘palatable Australian’, so it doesn’t make us happy like it makes them happy.

Vina made a similar point. She recounted that she “voiced my thoughts about it [Indo chic] to mum and she’d basically say, ‘Oh it’s okay they [non-Desi people] look so nice in it’ and I’m like no, it’s not. So she’s more of the perspective that it’s fine for them [non-South Asian people] to dress like that because she’s never had to grow up here. That’s the difference”. This difference was noted by many second-generation respondents, including Asha, who made a similar connection. She said, “My mum thinks totally different from me, she’s like ‘how great! They’re accepting our culture!’ and I’m like, sigh, I don’t think you get it. For her it’s a source of pride but for me, I cringe every time I see it”. Praise for Indo chic was expressed also by first-generation respondents Viola and Victoria, who made similar statements: “They look beautiful in it so let them wear it!” (Victoria) and “I don’t have any issue with white girls wearing Indian clothing. I dressed up my [white Australian] niece in a sari the other day. She looked beautiful in it—let me show you a photo” (Viola).

Their mothers do not ‘get it’. Their mothers do not get that, despite the promise of Australian multiculturalism, their children have been made to feel as if they do not belong to this multicultural nation—made to feel like their belonging to their homeland is conditional. In his work on non-white Australian diasporic communities, Hage discovered that the first generation of migrants generally ‘felt that they belonged to Australia because they had chosen to live here and had contributed to the nation through their hard work’ (Hage 1998, p. 57). The second generation makes no such pronouncements, their experience more affectively complex.

9. Conclusions

This article has argued that Indo chic is a productive object to examine the affective experiences of racialisation felt by South Asian Australian women in contemporary multicultural Australia. Indo chic reveals that the attachment many migrants in Australia have to the promise of multiculturalism is a relation of cruel optimism as a fair and equal, multicultural Australia does not (and may not ever) exist. This relation of cruel optimism manifests differently for first and second-generation South Asian Australian women, revealing itself in conversations had around Indo chic.

Affect theory posits that the personal is political, and the political is embodied. Scholars of affect argue for an affectual turn to social analyses as they account for how political truths are somatically felt. Lauren Berlant argues that affect theory is ‘another phase in the history of ideology theory that…brings us back to the encounter of what is sensed with what is known and what has impact in a new but also recognizable way’ (Berlant 2011, p. 53). Affect, therefore, helps us account for the links between discursive regimes of knowing and the bodies that internalise and act on these knowledges. Through an analysis of the responses from 12 South Asian Australian women, I argued that Indo chic conjured various bad affects characterised as ‘bad feelings’ like anger, shame, frustration and internalised racism for the second generation. For both generations, however, the central affect that flows through conversations around Indo chic is the feeling of belonging.

For my first-generation respondents, there is a feeling of belonging in Australia—a reciprocal feeling of being loved by the nation they love and have chosen to move to—that is securely attached. For them, an encounter with Indo chic does not dislodge this attachment. The second generation, their Australian-born daughters, however, have an insecure attachment to the Australian nation-state. Therefore, an encounter with Indo chic conjures a plethora of intermingled bad affect, informed by their restive experiences of belonging in contemporary multicultural Australia.

The nation-state, therefore, sits at the heart of this fissure within South Asian Australian kinship networks, revealing that the Australian nation-state is taken up differently in this cohort’s identity formation across a clear generational line. As articulated by respondent Sab, the second generation “didn’t have a choice” in the creation of their diasporic identity. They were born in Australia with parents from South Asia, which has always interpellated them as belonging ‘elsewhere’. In contemporary Australia, ‘culture’ has become the stand-in for ‘race’ and a person ‘having a culture’ is something that is applied to some bodies (racialised bodies) but not others (Stratton 2009). In this way, white bodies are able to claim Australian-ness (i.e., no culture as it is the dominant and therefore invisible culture) with tacit ease, whereas the bodies of non-white Australians are always in the process of being located as ‘from elsewhere’.

The first generation is literally from elsewhere. They are from South Asia and Australia becomes another home to them, another culture to perform and another layer of their identity. The brown bodies of the second generation are interpellated the same way by mainstream Australian society, but Australia is their only home, their true national identity and their main cultural orientation. They are even further alienated within their kinship networks as their ‘mum doesn’t get it’ due to these historical differences.

It therefore follows that these same second-generation diasporic South Asian Australian women feel attached to objects of their South Asian ‘culture’ when they are culturally appropriated and worn as Indo chic. As the responses from the interviews in this analysis reveal, their Australian-ness is put under threat when they wear these ‘Indo chic’ objects. Seeing other non-desi Australians wear these items without their Australian-ness being undermined feels abject to them. Therefore, they cannot see Indo chic as a good thing, as a symptom of multicultural, cross-cultural exchange. Instead, it reminds them that their love for the nation is unrequited and leaves them feeling that they do belong ‘elsewhere’ while knowing that, as Australians, the invoked ‘elsewhere’ of South Asia is a place they have never lived, and some have never even visited. Therefore, Indo chic feels like reciprocal love for the first generation (a cruel optimism as this love is always conditional). For the second generation, Indo chic is yet another symptom of a white supremacist hierarchy of power and bodies in a broken multicultural state (no optimism), and they react to it as such.