Liminal, Leadership, and the Long View
Leah Jing McIntosh & Cher Tan
In 2022, academic researchers Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Olivia Khoo and Jacqueline Lo reached out to Liminal, asking if we would contribute to a volume of essays on Asian Australian leadership. Initially to be published with ANU Press, the project has since found a home with Peril. We thought it made the most sense to house our essay about Liminal on Liminal.
Our deepest thanks to Mridula, Olivia and Jacqueline for their initial prompting and their support over the past few years.
When thinking about political change, the image of scaffolding comes to mind. It is difficult to imagine the Liminal project without the many Asian Australian artists and arts workers who came before: since the 1980s, organisations and individuals such as the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Peril magazine, the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN), and books such as Alice Pung’s edited anthology Growing Up Asian in Australia and Locating Asian Australian Cultures edited by Tseen Khoo, have all contributed significantly towards a long view of what it means to do the work of anti-racism. In an interview published in Liminal with Annette Shun Wah, the first Asian Australian Artistic Director of OzAsia festival, she expresses it simply:
“[...] when I think about the challenges I had, the sense of injustice and unfairness that I've had—I don’t want anyone else to suffer that or I just want to reduce it at least. When I think of those 30 years of painfully slow progress, I think of how many talented people were also there who didn't make it, those who gave up and went away. What a horrible thing for them, how unfair for them that they could not fulfil their potential in the way they wanted to. And what a great loss for the rest of us!”
This is just one example of what we mean by the long view, only made possible through intergenerational efforts that consist of memories and work both past and present. In another interview published in Liminal, writer Brian Castro notes that “intergenerational interrogations are very important. It is the first move towards creating a context and a history. It’s a museum for where we’re at. Nothing arises out of a vacuum.” The thought of “leadership” in this context, then, is difficult to pin down, for it is only through horizontal efforts that give the anti-racist movement a future. We are also convinced that, like ourselves, Asian Australian artists and arts workers did not step into Australian arts spaces with the intention to become or be regarded as leaders, for it was—and is—the attenuating circumstances that impel us to step into leadership roles. It is a reciprocal burden, so to speak—perhaps apt for our strange double positions as settler-migrants on stolen lands. Asian Australians navigate a fraught terrain where our identity as settlers is complicated by our visible difference and the historical narrative of Australia as a predominantly white settler nation; to claim such a thing as “leadership” in a settler-colonial state feels akin to a cognitive dissonance.
Indeed, how to describe Liminal? Perhaps the simplest way is to say that Liminal is a collection of literary interventions. Or, as articulated by Leah Jing McIntosh in her introduction of Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory—
At the heart of Liminal is the desire to intervene in the racist structures that shape this country’s cultural industries, imaginary landscapes, collective memories. We work against this landscape that is hostile to the simple matter of our existence—not to mention our labour, our desires, our dreams.
Some of us did not necessarily want to be here. But here we are. Like leadership, political desire arises from political necessity. In this desire for something so intangible, it is somewhat difficult to draw a circle around Liminal. Like many projects that spring from or revolve around minoritised positionalities, it grew from a sense of loss, of insufficiency, of frustration. The saying “you can’t be what you can’t see”—now immortalised within popular culture to the point of parody—initially guided Liminal into fruition. ① While it began as a small project—envisaged by McIntosh in the spring of 2016 as a set of twenty interviews—it nonetheless was a particular way to set forward an agenda towards personal becoming that only expanded in scope as other people sought their own. How many political projects begin this way? The first three interviews were conducted with friends: comics artist Lee Lai, photographer James J. Robinson, and editor Adolfo Aranjuez. These early conversations are meandering, tired, furious, thoughtful; they set the tone for the project to come.
2016 was a particularly charged year on the world stage, seeing Brexit, Pauline Hanson’s xenophobic return to Australian politics and Donald Trump’s rise to presidency in the United States, alongside tightening austerity measures. As it were, the chickens of white supremacy were coming home to roost, and those whose lives had been affected by it were seized by a particular sense of urgency. Although representation had already been a preoccupation for many racially minoritised artists and activists in the decades prior, the simultaneous amnesiac and accelerationist properties that would come to make up new media affective modes would push this desire towards newfound dimensions, underscoring a collective discontent borne from a resolute dissatisfaction with the status quo. Accordingly, in their respective interviews Lee Lai and James J. Robinson articulate sentiments that reflect a similar vexation that was burgeoning in so-called Australia as young Asian Australians were increasingly exposed to art, media, and literature from their diasporic homelands and elsewhere in the western world. Discussing narrative scarcity, Lee Lai responds: “We’re never going to have representation that we feel satisfied with unless there’s an over-saturation of images in culture that reflect who we are”, while James J. Robinson more explicitly acknowledges that, when he was growing up, “… all the media I consumed was white, so my idea of art was very white. Growing up, seeing films, watching television ... I just felt like oh this is what art is, it’s white things.” In the same year we were having these conversations, academic and writer Việt Thanh Nguyễn popularised the twinned concepts of “narrative scarcity” and “narrative plenitude” in his monograph Nothing Ever Dies. At the time, none of us had read Nguyễn’s book—we just knew that we wanted more. We could feel something shifting, and we wanted to shift with it, too.
The Liminal project launched in March 2017, publishing a longform interview every Monday morning. During these early days, the goal was towards greater and more thoughtful representation of Asian Australians, and it was this undeniability that we aimed for through the weekly publication model. We soon surpassed the initial aim of twenty interviews, with pitches filling the inbox each week. This was how we—the editors of Liminal and authors of this paper—first met. Digital circulation made it easier for a loose community to tentatively form; of course, it turned out that Asian Australians weren’t scarce, it seemed we were mostly just isolated from one another, somewhat siloed by the White Australian imaginary. No one person had to define what “Asian Australian” meant or felt like. Instead, much like our elders, we would do it together, and these definitions did not have to agree or map onto one another. As such, every subject was asked the question ‘What does being Asian Australian mean to you?’ as a way of ending each interview. Sometimes this is met with relief, the subject taking it as an opening to discuss how the ways they’d been perceived had impacted their lives; sometimes it met with discomfort or distaste, the subject dismissive of the concept and its relationship to their practice as they found the term incompatible with their political goals. Cacophony and disagreement about this identity category was welcome, and the fact that it continues to be contested by ourselves is a testimony to the broadness of the coalition, in which singular “leaders” will only—even unwittingly—flatten.
Together, both terms—“Asian” or “Australian’”—with or without the contentious hyphen between, become a knotted signifier of nationhood, culture, ethnicity and belonging. One need only look at a world map to see that the continent “Asia” is composed of fifty-one nations; it takes up about thirty percent of the earth’s total land area and comprises around sixty percent of the world’s population. Even so, some claim “Asianness” more than others, or are regarded as “Asian” more than others. In other words, “Asian” is a demarcation that builds itself against something else, in this case the predominant marker of whiteness, antiquated terms such as “the Orient” and “the Far East” notwithstanding. And so “Asian Australian” becomes yet another category both placed on us, and one that we and our elders have wielded to great effect, forming broad coalition to advocate for more. In a sense, the term’s elasticity is epitomised through our own distinct positionalities: though one of us is a first-generation Chinese Singaporean settler-migrant, and the other a sixth-generation mixed-race Chinese Australian, we still both fall into this leaky identity category of “Asian Australian”. On paper, what might we have in common? What informs our friendship and intellectual interrogations is common political desire, building from a shared ethos that consists of racial justice, to us inextricable from the artistic goals of brilliance and rigour.
Eight years on, Liminal has published over 225 longform interviews with Asian Australians. Each interview is paired with portraits of the interview subject, a simple but very specific decision, an attempt to derail the normalised expectation of the writer or artist as ‘White’: here we are, undeniable. Photography felt a natural way to build a visual lexicon of Asian Australian artists while also foregrounding their opinions, experiences and artistic output across a variety of disciplines. The interview series attempts to shift the Australian imaginary as well as a mood, and to connect disparate individuals; it is almost impossible to quantify its impact. Arts programmers have told us that they use our interview series as a directory from which they program their workshops and festivals; artists have told us that they have been contacted for professional or collaborative opportunities. We ourselves have forged relationships with other artists previously unknown to us through the project, strengthening the diversity of aesthetic and thought outside of our respective milieu. Friendships have been forged through these interviews; much like how the Liminal editors met, one of our favourite stories is of an artist contacting an interview subject because she finally felt seen. They are now close friends and have formed artistic collaborations. Such relationship building—both professional and personal—cannot be evaluated. Yet it is Liminal’s objective, for we believe that the work towards incremental political change only occurs through community capacity building.
✷
In the arts, projects such as Liminal come with material costs. Our first year was entirely self-funded; we didn’t know that arts funding existed, and even if we had, the bar to entry felt intimidatingly high, especially as it involved navigating things such as the specific vernacular of grant writing, and asking for support letters that often required strong connections with industry figures. The highest bar to entry, however, proved to be the confidence required. Who were we to claim this project was of importance, let alone important enough to fund? We took great solace from a now-deleted 2016 tweet by Sarah Hagi: “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” If not entirely opaque, the workings of the arts industry are at best difficult to glean from the outside. Early opportunities were discovered through the random luck that sometimes makes up the experience of social media: a link shared by a peer; noticing advertising circulating through Twitter or Instagram. This was how we learned about the City of Melbourne’s Signal Arts, a creative studio for young people, through which we received a much-needed crash course on arts management: event production, project funding, marketing, budgets, timelines, contingencies, risk management. As one of five projects chosen for their 2017 Young Creatives Lab, we received a grant to produce our first publication, Third Space, a book of interviews, alongside our first community event: Liminal Presents.
As such, Liminal’s work moved offline and into physical arenas, where we could continue to build on the camaraderie we had nurtured online into spaces where we could directly embody the terms of solidarity. That inaugural event sold out, audience members packing into Signal’s event space to listen to artist Mama Alto host readings from eight then-emerging Asian Australian writers, including novelist Bobuq Sayed, essayist Elizabeth Flux, academic Eugenia Flynn and writer Xen Nhà. This event provided a map for the many free community events Liminal has run since, which are often packed shoulder-to-shoulder as people congregate to listen to poetry and music. It was at these events that we realised just how much the aforementioned isolation of Asian Australians was getting exposed and then counteracted, even if only through small acts of gathering.
The first stone was thrown, so to speak. Being visible in this way led to Liminal receiving a small grant from Multicultural Arts Victoria in 2017, to present photographs of Liminal interview subjects at No Vacancy, as part of the Mapping Melbourne festival. Aside from the thrill of such a public exhibition, a long-lasting outcome of this opportunity was connecting with arts workers who saw and believed in the project’s potential; we would continue to work with producer Freyja MacFarlane over the next five years. Part of “leadership”, perhaps, is to understand that, like the positions we become thrown into, collaborations can be accidental too, made up of rhizomatic alliances that don’t necessarily form with identity in mind. With MacFarlane’s support, we produced more poetry readings and music performances; an exhibition at Testing Grounds; and two publications, Time and Sanctuary, featuring work by Asian Australian writers and artists. At the beginning, twenty interviews had seemed daunting enough. Of course, it suits a white supremacy if we feel small. White inheritances are insidious; they wind their way into how we think and how we dream, mutating our ontologies. With one’s imagination so inevitably compressed, Liminal, in this sense, only grew and became because of others, who saw its potential and pulled. It was this particular horizontalism that enables Liminal to exist the way it does today.
Retrospectively, it is easy to read Liminal through the lens of different modes of support: beginning with talking to and promoting writers, then moving to commissioning their work, and then building further opportunities such as awards, writing workshops, mentorships, guest-editorships, residencies. This was not the plan. We had set out to talk to other artists about their work as a way to interrogate our own lives, publishing them in a public forum which encouraged engagement from more others—a communal conversation, if you will. Yet the further we entered the literary industries, we found ourselves increasingly pressed up against structural inequalities. Everywhere we looked there appeared to be a lack: why were talented Asian Australian artists and writers forever “emerging”—or worse, languishing in obscurity? Who did we have to look towards as mentors? What opportunities could we pursue that didn’t seek to tokenise us? How could we create culturally safe(r) spaces that encouraged collegiality and community with one another? With this surmounting knowledge of just how structural racism works, simply publishing work seemed insufficient. Is this leadership, or is it a simply a choice to act?
If there was an urgency when the Liminal project began, here it felt as if the urgency had attained a new political clarity as we continued uncovering more insidious racial prejudices. Now the desire was no longer simply about representation but something more: justice. This was perhaps a goalpost our elders had not been able to reach, not at all because of lack of effort, but a lack of groundswell, which AASRN founder Tseen Khoo acknowledges in an interview in Liminal: “Pre-social media, it was much harder to discern the momentum of Asian Australian Studies work and track who was doing what, or to collaborate across disciplines and locations to make things happen.” In addition to publication opportunities, Liminal began to run mentorships, workshops, and writing fellowships. Around the same time, McIntosh began researching Australian literary prizes and found drastic racial inequalities which led to the creation of our own national literary prizes: the Liminal Prize for Fiction (2019) and the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize (2021).
It was at this moment that we began thinking through the possibilities of coalition-building: how could we extend what we had learned and built, towards other racialised communities? After all, the isolation some of us had experienced under white ontological frameworks bled out to silo racialised people from one another too; it no longer seemed sufficient to merely amplify the work of Asian Australians. What we had learned and observed over the years had led us to directly understand just how our struggles are interconnected. Of course, it was not just Asian Australians who had been elided or ignored by these institutions. In 2019, when McIntosh reviewed the winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award from 1957 to 2019, she could count not only the Asian Australian winners but all the writers of colour on one hand. Under white supremacy, our oppression is intertwined. As such, we ensured the prizes were open to Indigenous writers and writers of colour; the longlisted writers for each prize were offered further publication opportunities, culminating in the short-story anthology Collisions (2020) and the award-winning essay collection Against Disappearance (2022).These were acts of seeing that could not be undone as soon as we began noticing; a collective witnessing and reckoning that continued to build momentum as we learned and grew alongside one another both online and off.
We also saw just how much the White Australian imaginary had also leaked into literary criticism, so Liminal sought to address this too, establishing our flagship journal the Liminal Review of Books in 2021. Just like for Collisions and Against Disappearance, we invited Indigenous writers and writers of colour to contribute criticism. The Liminal Review of Books works such that we commission work on critical objects outside of the review cycle, in order to push against contemporary reviewing culture, providing an opportunity to retroactively critique something impactful yet considered “irrelevant”, or better still, deliver the much-needed critique from a position that was unavailable previously. In this refusal, we aim to create some space for literary critics of colour to lead us to rigorous and thoughtful analysis. Much of the “leadership’” involved in the Liminal project is not to lead anyone to any specific destination, but rather to create space for artists to embark on necessary and thoughtful work.
At the same time, we are familiar with the precarity that comes with the writing life; since 2017, Liminal has kept the bar to access as low as possible through free digital access to our online content, and a focus on free community events. Over time, as well, we sought to incrementally shift the conditions in which the work was made, so we gradually made our writing fees some of the highest in Australia, and began paying superannuation, acknowledging the burden of precarity on writers. Even still, there is such a long way to go.
And it is here that we return to the long view. It is an unfortunate truth: in a white-dominated literary world, writing as “the Other” becomes a political act. Like the leadership that has been inadvertently handed to us, it needn’t necessarily be this way, yet there is no other way. In an interview with Ouyang Yu in 2001, Brian Castro mentioned that “subjects such as racism and prejudice are not so much political as forming the basis of what it means to be human or inhuman”. ② Our desire for justice here now grows to incorporate the desire to abolish this burden completely. In a sense, the question of leadership feels akin to a golden trap. To return to Ouyang, who writes in an article critiquing the state of poetry in Australia in 2001: “We’ll create a minor-stream, which may grow into a mainstream one day, I am sure.” ③ As we can see from this paper and elsewhere, Ouyang’s “minor-stream” is no longer so minor, two decades on. Another image of a stream comes to mind, in a review of Against Disappearance by Jinghua Qian: “This anthology could be a stone in a creek—an interruption to the flow of discourse, or just a staunch presence that is part of both the river and its redirection.” These are the stakes: to interrupt, while aiming to redirect, or build something new. We work towards the goal of abolition so we don’t have to be here in the future, so other people can continue.
✷✷✷
Footnotes
In 2016, this idea was notably prevalent, evidenced in our interview with playwright Michelle Law: “Deep down, I’ve always felt I’ve had a right to a platform and I try to assert my voice for younger people of similar backgrounds so they feel like they have a place. You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Ouyang Yu, “An Interview with Brian Castro,” from Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese Australia Writing, ed. Wenche Ommundsen, Otherland Literary Journal, 2001.
Ouyang Yu, “Absence Asia: What’s Wrong with Australian Poetry?” Overland 163, 2001.