Kay Anderson is a fractional Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society. She is a leading, internationally recognised scholar in the fields of Cultural Geography and race historiography. Her sole-author book, Race and the crisis of humanism (Routledge 2007) won the 2008 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Critical Writing and her award-winning Vancouver's Chinatown: racial discourse in Canada 1875-1980 (McGill-Queens UP 1991) is in its 5th edition. She is co-editor of Environment: critical essays in human geography (Ashgate 2008) and the Handbook of cultural geography (Sage 2002). She is an editorial board member of 'Cultural Geographies', and section editor on 'Cultural and Social Geography' for the Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Elsevier 2009).
Professor Anderson was Chair of Cultural Geography at Durham University (UK) until 2003, and in 2004 was elected Academician, Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences for the UK. In 2007, she became an Elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Professor Anderson is Chief Investigator on the ARC grant, Decolonising the Human: Towards a Postcolonial Ecology (ARC Discovery 2011-13) and a CI on the ARC Linkage grant (2012-15) titled 'Sydney's Chinatown in the Asian Century: From Ethnic Enclave to Global Hub'.
This chapter puts together ideological critiques of ‘race’ and human exceptionality in order to p... more This chapter puts together ideological critiques of ‘race’ and human exceptionality in order to problematise and provincialise a comprehensively colonial conception of the human. More specifically, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century scientists mobilised the idea of race in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern humanism in which were buried stereotypes about the superiority and inferiority of certain modes of life and people. The chapter’s purpose in so doing is not to reiterate critiques of the depiction of Indigenous people as ‘less-than-human’. Instead it is to unsettle, and possibly rethink, the very terms in which the human was figured in western cultural and philosophical traditions. A particular understanding of the human is tracked through – variously anxious, boldly argued – investments in the idea that ‘we’ are nature-transcending beings: from Georges Cuvier’s attribution of intelligence to beings who walk upright; to Alfred Wallace’s claims for a distinct form of human mental evolution; to today’s human exceptionalists, for whom our unique technological ingenuity will apparently help avert ecological catastrophe. Critically routing narratives of human distinction and development through these sketches serves to decolonise humanism, uncover its radical instabilities, suggest its violent legacies across human and nonhuman registers, and open ground for engaging more rigorously and responsively with alternate modalities of be(com)ing human
Much like Great White North, Australia's Wide Brown Land is a rich and resilient myth of nati... more Much like Great White North, Australia's Wide Brown Land is a rich and resilient myth of nation. Said to sit tenuously on both sides of the North-South divide, Australia is often characterized as a Western country under southern skies in a Third World environment. It is the flat, scorched land of far horizons and endless skies whose narrative force finds its inverse congruence in the rugged and icy terrain of Arctic Canada. If landscape is a key mode of human signification, Great White North and Wide Brown Land are its defining instances, all the more dramatized in the characteristic staging of their antipodality. From furthest north to deepest south, ice storm to heat wave, cold feet to sunburnt noses, these iconic categories share in the spatialized trope of extremity. How might this be so? And what matters of concern does it call up
This study investigates homebuyer knowledge and preferences for facilities supplied through S.94 ... more This study investigates homebuyer knowledge and preferences for facilities supplied through S.94 Development Contributions at three sites in suburban Sydney. In the context of debate about the use of the developer levy mechanism for funding community services, it is timely to explore the assumptions underlying decision making about what facilities are to be provided through this mechanism.This study investigates homebuyer knowledge and preferences for facilities supplied through Development Contributions at three sites in suburban Sydney. In the context of debate about the use of the developer levy mechanism for funding community services, it is timely to explore the assumptions underlying decision making about what facilities are to be provided through this mechanism. On the one hand, developers have raised concerns about the limits, and intergenerational equity, of an expanding "shopping list" to be funded up front through S.94 contributions, while councils have been con...
The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal n... more The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal nature is stubbornly persistent in western cultural formations. This article (see Acknowledgements) works with, and against, recent materialist moves within Cultural Geography to critically engage the idea that the human is in some sense irreducible to nature. It considers how comparative anatomists of the early 19th century – in explicitly departing from the 18th-century Cartesian dualism that had identified the human with an immaterial notion of soul or mind – looked to the human body, and above all the head, in order to establish that people were categorically different from all other animals. More specifically, the paper considers how it was to ‘race’ that scientists turned, in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern strand of humanism. The discourse of humanism is thus considered, not – as many would have it – as an otherworldly or flawed myth, irremediabl...
Chinatown, as a distinctive urban space, exists in almost all major cities in Western countries. ... more Chinatown, as a distinctive urban space, exists in almost all major cities in Western countries. As a richly storied place, Chinatown has been the focus of successive generations of social science ...
Focusing on the nineteenth century practice of craniometry, this paper considers how strategies o... more Focusing on the nineteenth century practice of craniometry, this paper considers how strategies of producing racial ‘knowledge’ played a key role in the development of ideas about the human. Supplementing the familiar claim that nineteenth century racial craniometry was designed to biologise longstanding aesthetic prejudices about variations in human physical appearance, the paper offers a more specific understanding of the role of this practice in biologising race. Taking up the post-Linnaean context in which a biological conception of race was elaborated, it considers how early nineteenth century debates about the unique and exceptional status of the human – classically identified with the soul or mind – centred upon the head. The practice of craniometry, it is suggested, can be understood in this context, as its centrality in the emergence of a biological conception of race is traced to an effort to demonstrate the material existence of the mind. The possibility proposed in this paper, therefore, is that particular physical differences between various peoples came to be regarded as racially significant in the nineteenth century attempt to determine the exceptional status of the human.
... 27 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson 3 The Public City 49 Sophie Watson ... 2 Re... more ... 27 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson 3 The Public City 49 Sophie Watson ... 2 Rescripting Cities with Difference Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson The study of cities produces scripts of their coming into being, their logics, and their inhabitants. ...
ABSTRACT This article examines the modes of emergence of “the local” in particular collaborative ... more ABSTRACT This article examines the modes of emergence of “the local” in particular collaborative art projects in suburban Sydney (Australia) as outflows of singular interfaces between artists, institutions, audiences, and administrators. We begin analytically with the circulations that variously draw on and craft notions of locality and community in two projects staged in western Sydney, both involving nonlocal artists collaborating with business entities and arts institutions. In each case, specific circulations worked to produce a differently spatialized interplay of artists’ processes, aesthetic objects, events, performances and dialogues. The article develops a working conception of “interspatiality” that draws on actor network and assemblage concepts to elicit how creative labor entangles people, places, communities, and ways of working and thinking.
This paper draws upon assemblage theory to challenge the familiar argument that nineteenth centur... more This paper draws upon assemblage theory to challenge the familiar argument that nineteenth century craniometry – the practice of head measuring – was simply a racist practice. Approaching this practice as constitutive rather than derivative of racial discourse, we consider how race might be rethought if the head were regarded, not as just another focus for the racialization of the
This chapter puts together ideological critiques of ‘race’ and human exceptionality in order to p... more This chapter puts together ideological critiques of ‘race’ and human exceptionality in order to problematise and provincialise a comprehensively colonial conception of the human. More specifically, the chapter considers how nineteenth-century scientists mobilised the idea of race in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern humanism in which were buried stereotypes about the superiority and inferiority of certain modes of life and people. The chapter’s purpose in so doing is not to reiterate critiques of the depiction of Indigenous people as ‘less-than-human’. Instead it is to unsettle, and possibly rethink, the very terms in which the human was figured in western cultural and philosophical traditions. A particular understanding of the human is tracked through – variously anxious, boldly argued – investments in the idea that ‘we’ are nature-transcending beings: from Georges Cuvier’s attribution of intelligence to beings who walk upright; to Alfred Wallace’s claims for a distinct form of human mental evolution; to today’s human exceptionalists, for whom our unique technological ingenuity will apparently help avert ecological catastrophe. Critically routing narratives of human distinction and development through these sketches serves to decolonise humanism, uncover its radical instabilities, suggest its violent legacies across human and nonhuman registers, and open ground for engaging more rigorously and responsively with alternate modalities of be(com)ing human
Much like Great White North, Australia's Wide Brown Land is a rich and resilient myth of nati... more Much like Great White North, Australia's Wide Brown Land is a rich and resilient myth of nation. Said to sit tenuously on both sides of the North-South divide, Australia is often characterized as a Western country under southern skies in a Third World environment. It is the flat, scorched land of far horizons and endless skies whose narrative force finds its inverse congruence in the rugged and icy terrain of Arctic Canada. If landscape is a key mode of human signification, Great White North and Wide Brown Land are its defining instances, all the more dramatized in the characteristic staging of their antipodality. From furthest north to deepest south, ice storm to heat wave, cold feet to sunburnt noses, these iconic categories share in the spatialized trope of extremity. How might this be so? And what matters of concern does it call up
This study investigates homebuyer knowledge and preferences for facilities supplied through S.94 ... more This study investigates homebuyer knowledge and preferences for facilities supplied through S.94 Development Contributions at three sites in suburban Sydney. In the context of debate about the use of the developer levy mechanism for funding community services, it is timely to explore the assumptions underlying decision making about what facilities are to be provided through this mechanism.This study investigates homebuyer knowledge and preferences for facilities supplied through Development Contributions at three sites in suburban Sydney. In the context of debate about the use of the developer levy mechanism for funding community services, it is timely to explore the assumptions underlying decision making about what facilities are to be provided through this mechanism. On the one hand, developers have raised concerns about the limits, and intergenerational equity, of an expanding "shopping list" to be funded up front through S.94 contributions, while councils have been con...
The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal n... more The fantasy of a human being who is, or becomes, human to the extent they move away from animal nature is stubbornly persistent in western cultural formations. This article (see Acknowledgements) works with, and against, recent materialist moves within Cultural Geography to critically engage the idea that the human is in some sense irreducible to nature. It considers how comparative anatomists of the early 19th century – in explicitly departing from the 18th-century Cartesian dualism that had identified the human with an immaterial notion of soul or mind – looked to the human body, and above all the head, in order to establish that people were categorically different from all other animals. More specifically, the paper considers how it was to ‘race’ that scientists turned, in order to provide an anatomical foundation for a specifically modern strand of humanism. The discourse of humanism is thus considered, not – as many would have it – as an otherworldly or flawed myth, irremediabl...
Chinatown, as a distinctive urban space, exists in almost all major cities in Western countries. ... more Chinatown, as a distinctive urban space, exists in almost all major cities in Western countries. As a richly storied place, Chinatown has been the focus of successive generations of social science ...
Focusing on the nineteenth century practice of craniometry, this paper considers how strategies o... more Focusing on the nineteenth century practice of craniometry, this paper considers how strategies of producing racial ‘knowledge’ played a key role in the development of ideas about the human. Supplementing the familiar claim that nineteenth century racial craniometry was designed to biologise longstanding aesthetic prejudices about variations in human physical appearance, the paper offers a more specific understanding of the role of this practice in biologising race. Taking up the post-Linnaean context in which a biological conception of race was elaborated, it considers how early nineteenth century debates about the unique and exceptional status of the human – classically identified with the soul or mind – centred upon the head. The practice of craniometry, it is suggested, can be understood in this context, as its centrality in the emergence of a biological conception of race is traced to an effort to demonstrate the material existence of the mind. The possibility proposed in this paper, therefore, is that particular physical differences between various peoples came to be regarded as racially significant in the nineteenth century attempt to determine the exceptional status of the human.
... 27 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson 3 The Public City 49 Sophie Watson ... 2 Re... more ... 27 Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson 3 The Public City 49 Sophie Watson ... 2 Rescripting Cities with Difference Ruth Fincher, Jane M. Jacobs, and Kay Anderson The study of cities produces scripts of their coming into being, their logics, and their inhabitants. ...
ABSTRACT This article examines the modes of emergence of “the local” in particular collaborative ... more ABSTRACT This article examines the modes of emergence of “the local” in particular collaborative art projects in suburban Sydney (Australia) as outflows of singular interfaces between artists, institutions, audiences, and administrators. We begin analytically with the circulations that variously draw on and craft notions of locality and community in two projects staged in western Sydney, both involving nonlocal artists collaborating with business entities and arts institutions. In each case, specific circulations worked to produce a differently spatialized interplay of artists’ processes, aesthetic objects, events, performances and dialogues. The article develops a working conception of “interspatiality” that draws on actor network and assemblage concepts to elicit how creative labor entangles people, places, communities, and ways of working and thinking.
This paper draws upon assemblage theory to challenge the familiar argument that nineteenth centur... more This paper draws upon assemblage theory to challenge the familiar argument that nineteenth century craniometry – the practice of head measuring – was simply a racist practice. Approaching this practice as constitutive rather than derivative of racial discourse, we consider how race might be rethought if the head were regarded, not as just another focus for the racialization of the
‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisd... more ‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of ‘the East’ in ‘the West’. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference.
By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a placein Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an inte-connected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations.. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
Vancouver's Chinatown offers an exciting interpretation of a locality whose significance extends ... more Vancouver's Chinatown offers an exciting interpretation of a locality whose significance extends far beyond the boundaries of Chinatown into the contemporary public affairs of any society in the Western world that receives immigrants.
Popular wisdom maintains that the colourful Chinese quarters of Canadian, American, and Australian cities owe their existence to the generations of Chinese immigrants who have made their lives there. The restaurants, pagodas, and neon lights are seen as intrinsically connected to the Chinese and their immigrant experience in the West. Kay Anderson argues, however, that "Chinatown" is a Western construction, illustrative of a process of cultural domination that gave European settlers in North America and Australia the power to define and shape the district according to their own images and interests.
Anderson charts the construction of Chinatown in the minds and streets of the white community of Vancouver over a hundred year period. She shows that Chinatown -- from the negative stereotyping of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its current status as an "ethnic neighbourhood" -- has been stamped by changing European ideologies of race and the hegemonic policies those ideas have shaped. The very existence of the district is the result of a regime of cultural domination that continues to exist today.
Anderson clearly rejects the concept of "race" as a means of distinguishing between groups of human beings. She points out that because the implicit acceptance of public beliefs about race affects the types of questions asked by researchers, the issue of the ontological status of race is as critical for commentators on society as it is for scientists studying human variation. Anderson applies this fresh approach toward the concept of race to a critical examination of popular, media, and academic treatments of the Chinatown in Vancouver.
The idea that humankind constituted a unity, albeit at different stages of 'development', was in ... more The idea that humankind constituted a unity, albeit at different stages of 'development', was in the 19th century challenged with a new way of thinking. The 'savagery' of certain races was no longer regarded as a stage in their progress towards 'civilisation', but as their permanent state. What caused this shift?
In Kay Anderson's provocative new account, she argues that British colonial encounters in Australia from the late 1700s with the apparently unimproved condition of the Australian Aborigine, viewed against an understanding of 'humanity' of the time (that is, as characterised by separation from nature), precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human.
This lucid, intelligent and persuasive argument will be necessary reading for all scholars and upper-level students interested in the history and theories of 'race', critical human geography, anthropology, and Australian and environmental studies.
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By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a placein Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an inte-connected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations.. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
Popular wisdom maintains that the colourful Chinese quarters of Canadian, American, and Australian cities owe their existence to the generations of Chinese immigrants who have made their lives there. The restaurants, pagodas, and neon lights are seen as intrinsically connected to the Chinese and their immigrant experience in the West. Kay Anderson argues, however, that "Chinatown" is a Western construction, illustrative of a process of cultural domination that gave European settlers in North America and Australia the power to define and shape the district according to their own images and interests.
Anderson charts the construction of Chinatown in the minds and streets of the white community of Vancouver over a hundred year period. She shows that Chinatown -- from the negative stereotyping of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its current status as an "ethnic neighbourhood" -- has been stamped by changing European ideologies of race and the hegemonic policies those ideas have shaped. The very existence of the district is the result of a regime of cultural domination that continues to exist today.
Anderson clearly rejects the concept of "race" as a means of distinguishing between groups of human beings. She points out that because the implicit acceptance of public beliefs about race affects the types of questions asked by researchers, the issue of the ontological status of race is as critical for commentators on society as it is for scientists studying human variation. Anderson applies this fresh approach toward the concept of race to a critical examination of popular, media, and academic treatments of the Chinatown in Vancouver.
In Kay Anderson's provocative new account, she argues that British colonial encounters in Australia from the late 1700s with the apparently unimproved condition of the Australian Aborigine, viewed against an understanding of 'humanity' of the time (that is, as characterised by separation from nature), precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human.
This lucid, intelligent and persuasive argument will be necessary reading for all scholars and upper-level students interested in the history and theories of 'race', critical human geography, anthropology, and Australian and environmental studies.