Living Locally, Dreaming Globally: Transnational Cultural Imaginings and Practices in the Hmong Diaspora

This chapter is part of a larger project exploring the impact of globalisation on Australian national identity. In this chapter I examine identification processes among a small Asian community in Australia by drawing on my research with Hmong in Tasmania. My involvement with the Hmong community in Tasmania began in 1993 when some colleagues and I from the University of Tasmania were approached by Vue Thaow, the first Hmong person to settle in Tasmania, to undertake research on Hmong settlement experiences. We secured funding from the then Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research to undertake a study of refugee settlement in Tasmania. This examined the settlement experiences of the largest refugee communities in the state at that time, namely, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chilean, El Salvadoran, Polish and Kurdish.