ICS Seminar Series – Sukhmani Khorana

Date: Thursday 31 March 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.2.02, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Sukhmani Khorana

(University of Wollongong)

South Asian Grocery Stores in a Sydney Suburb: Conviviality in Transit

Abstract 

This paper takes the emerging Indian diaspora in Australia (which has been mapped in terms of its demographic composition elsewhere - see Khorana, 2014), and its embeddedness in Australian suburbia as a starting point. The embeddedness itself is explored through the materiality and location of the numerous Indian and South Asian grocery stores that have accompanied the growing numbers of Indian, Nepalese and Bangladeshi migrants, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. However, the point of this exploration is not merely to reflect on identity construction and negotiation in the diaspora. Rather, these stores are considered for their contribution to the 'diversity' of contemporary Australian urban spaces, and for having the potential to facilitate 'conviviality' amongst ethno-linguistic groups in diverse areas. In the British context, Gilroy has characterised the solidarities born of habitual interaction in multicultural, working-class localities as 'conviviality': 'what he defines as "the process of cohabitation and interaction which have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life"' (cited in Noble, 2013: 166).

In other words, there is unexplored potential in terms of reading spaces marked by ethnic specificity, such as Indian grocery stores - these are crucial not just for what they say about the community/communities they were set up to cater to. They also become sites where inter-cultural assemblages and people-to-people interactions are enacted and facilitated, all within the framework of the diversifying suburban locale.

Biography

Sukhmani Khorana is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. She is the editor of a Routledge anthology titled Crossover Cinema (2013). Sukhmani has published extensively on news television, diasporic film, and multi-platform refugee narratives. With Kate Darian-Smith and Sue Turnbull, she holds a current ARC Linkage project (with the Museum of Victoria and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image) examining the role of television in the experience of migration to Australia. 

Sukhmani is currently working on a new book project on food and mediated cosmopolitanism in Australia. She has also published creative non-fiction and commentary in outlets such as The Conversation, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, and Peril, and is a co-convenor of the Asian Australian Film Forum and Network.