Counter-representations in an Australian web drama: trans-Pacific repertoire and diasporic contradictions in <i>No Ordinary Love</i>

Abstract No Ordinary Love is a web drama written by Esther Fwati, a Zambian Australian actor-writer, and her friend, Helen Kim, a Korean Australian writer-director. The five-episode web drama, which claims to be “inspired” by Korean television, positions a diasporic story of multiracial, inter-diasporic love between a Zambian Australian woman and a Korean Australian man. Despite its short length, the web drama’s counter-representational choices weave together global media flows and diasporic interpretations of race and family in multicultural Australia. I argue that the show’s explicit counter-representational centering of a Black woman and an Asian man subverts gendered racialization, and its assertion of diasporic communities as commonplace disrupts ideas of Australia as White and Anglophone. However, its representation of immigrant family conflict displaces racism onto the immigrant mother that stands in contrast to Australia as a multicultural nation that is progressive in its acceptance of difference.