Water Imaginations and Aqueous Forms in Asian Australian Literature: Studying Migrant Perspectives for the Decolonial Blue Humanities

This research project will offer the first decolonial blue humanities perspective on Asian
Australian literature. It stands as a crucial intervention at a time when climate
disruption of water cycles is exacerbating border crossing, yet the significance of
migrant, refugee, and ethnic water narratives remains largely unexplored. On the one
hand, settler colonial nation-states like Australia have been using environmental
discourses of water, oceans, and climate to dehumanize migrants and refugees as
invasive threats to white humanism, underscoring the need to decolonise the liberal
possessive “human” as the agent of planetary history. On the other hand, Asian
Australian claims for place, justice, and multiculturalism tend to overlook their own
complicity with settler colonial logics of nation and property ownership, which risks
reinforcing Indigenous dispossession alongside extractive capitalism. While previous
diasporic and transnational studies have mobilized abstract or capitalist water
imaginaries to counter racism, I explore, through Asian Australian literary and artistic
production, how racial differences are reproduced through capitalist accumulation and
the different visions from migrant and Indigenous relationalities with water in various
narratives of the Gold Rush, pearling, Pacific plantations, refugee migration, and climate
change.
How do bodies of water materialise settler humanist infrastructures of race, property,
and mobility? How are land-based colonial, heterosexual, and capitalist subjectivities
continued or ruptured in aqueous modes of relationality? In what ways Asian Australian
writers and artists are able to take initiatives and produce decolonial and postanthropocentric narratives of water, oceans, and climate? This project will combine
methods of cultural analysis, environmental history research, and creative practice to:
(1) theorize water agencies of colonial and racial subjection in ecologies of migrant
labour, placemaking, corporeality, and interracial relations; (2) develop ecomaterial and
ecocultural modes of inquiry into the role of water in constructing Asian Australian
subjectivity; (3) illuminate how oceanic imaginations can elucidate a more-than-human biopolitics in refugee studies; 4) increase dialogue between Asian diasporic and
Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander studies regarding decolonisation and climate
futures; (5) produce a book monograph and a climate art exhibition to amplify migrant
perspectives about water’s creative-connective capacity in gestating climate and water
action. Through an innovative study of Asian Australian hydro-criticism, the project will
help to expand blue humanities by understanding how waterscapes are significant for
cultural and aesthetic production, and how water movements of race and diaspora are
constitutive in the making and unmaking a colonial hierarchy of life and things.