Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia

318 Pages·2020·3.294 MB·English

by  Jon Stratton

Multiculturalism,
Whiteness and
Otherness in Australia
Jon Stratton
Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness
in Australia
Jon Stratton
Multiculturalism,
Whiteness
and Otherness
in Australia
Jon Stratton
UniSA Creative
University of South Australia
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-50078-8 ISBN 978-3-030-50079-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilarmethodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
namesareexemptfromtherelevantprotectivelawsandregulationsandthereforefreefor
general use.
Thepublisher,theauthorsandtheeditorsaresafetoassumethattheadviceandinforma-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with
respecttothematerialcontainedhereinorforanyerrorsoromissionsthatmayhavebeen
made.Thepublisherremainsneutralwithregardtojurisdictionalclaimsinpublishedmaps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
These days I am attached as an adjunct professor in UniSA Creative at
the University of South Australia. I should like to thank Professor Susan
Luckman for facilitating my presence there. Susan has been a thoughtful
colleague helping out where possible with funding and generally making
my life as an adjunct far more pleasant than is usual. My associates in
Creative People, Products and Places, of which Professor Luckman is the
Director, have been unfailingly supportive and friendly. A big shout out
especially to Kasia/Katrina Jaworski.
IshouldalsoliketothankDr.JessicaTaylorwhohasfunctionedasmy
researchassistantonthisproject.HerworkhasbeenexcellentandIthank
her particularly for her rapid turnarounds when I know that she has been
overwhelmed with other demands on her time.
Panizza Allmark, Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, has
been both friend and partner through the life of this project. I thank
her for her support and love, easing my anxieties and being an emotional
refuge in times of need. I hope that I have reciprocated in at least some
small way. I thank Panizza also for her intellectual input to this project.
She is the coauthor of Chapter 2.
Someofthematerialinthisbookhasappearedindifferent,andearlier,
formsinotherplaces.PartsofChapter3havebeenreworkedfrom‘With
God on Our Side: Christianity, Whiteness, Islam and Otherness in the
Australian Experience’ in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies,vol.30,no.6,2016,pp.613–626and‘Whiteness,Morality,and
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Christianity in Australia’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 37, no.
1,2016,pp.17–43.Chapter5isreproducedfrom‘WhoseHome;Which
Island?:DisplacementandIdentityin“MyIslandHome”’inPerfectBeat:
The Pacific Journal for Research into Contemporary Music and Popular
Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2013, pp. 33–53. Much of Chapter 6 was first
publishedin‘TheJacksonJive:BlackfaceTodayandtheLimitsofWhite-
ness in Australia’ in Journal of the European Association for Studies on
Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 22–41.
Contents
1 Introduction: Logics of Exclusion 1
2 Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene
of the 1980s: Coauthored with Panizza Allmark (Edith
Cowan University) 41
3 With God on Our Side: The Unholy Mixture
of Religion and Race, Christianity and Whiteness,
Islam and Otherness, in the Australian Experience 73
4 The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes:
Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires 119
5 Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement
and Identity in ‘My Island Home’ 145
6 The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits
of Whiteness in Australia 169
7 Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come
the Habibs! Race, Identity and Representation 203
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive
Construction of the Underclass and Its Representation 231
9 Afterword: And then Novel Coronavirus Happened … 261
References 275
Index 305
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Logics of Exclusion
The guiding theme of this book is the importance of exclusion in the
modern state. To be more specific the assumption which underlies the
book is that while exclusion played a foundational role in the formation
of the modern state marking borders both internal and external to the
state, in the state reconstructed on neoliberal economic terms exclusion
has become pervasive. It exists not only at the border and demarcating
those acceptable within the state from those, the mad, the bad and
the shiftless, whom the state confined but there is now a circumstance
where to a lesser or greater extent anybody, but especially members of
certain marginalised groups, may find themselves excluded. The focus
of this book is Australia. In their discussion on the long-lasting impact
of Enlightenment values on Australian society, Baden Offord and his
colleagues(2014,p.2)remarkthatoneoftheconsequencesofthecoun-
try’s settler origins is that ‘cultural priorities that persist rest on a deep
fear of the other within (the indigenous) and the other without (generic
Asia, the migrant, asylum seeker)’. Here we have a way of understanding
whyexclusionhasbeensuchaprevalentaspectofAustralia’ssocialhistory
even before its reinforcement by neoliberalism.
This book picks over the rubble left by official multiculturalism. As
we shall see, multiculturalism in Australia functioned quite differently to
the multiculturalism that is enshrined in Canadian law through an act of
parliament. We can add that in both cases what has been described as
© The Author(s) 2020 1
J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_1
2 J. STRATTON
multiculturalism is different again from what has passed for multicultur-
alism in Europe. Here is Alana Lentin and Gavin Tilley (2011, p. 13)
writing about the turn against multiculturalism there:
multiculturalism is widely regarded as a violently failed experiment. The
narrative goes something like this. The ‘multicultural fantasy in Europe’
(David Rieff ‘The dream of multiculturalism is over’ New York Times
2005) valorised difference over commonality, cultural particularity over
socialcohesion,andanapologeticrelativismattheexpenseofsharedvalues
and a commitment to liberty of expression, women’s rights and sexual
freedom.
In Europe, as Lentin and Tilley (2011, p. 13) go on to write: ‘In what
would once have been read as extremist language, [multiculturalism] is
regarded as cultural surrender’. Shared values were precisely the founda-
tionofofficialmulticulturalisminAustraliaandfarfromitbeingthought
of as cultural surrender, multiculturalism was understood as broadening
and deepening the Anglo-Australian culture which remained privileged
but that, as a settler society, has always been thought of in Australia as in
process.
Australian multiculturalism worked to produce diversity lite, a diver-
sity that functioned in terms of shared values. When Australia sought to
increaserapidlyitspopulationaftertheconclusionofWorldWarTwo,and
achieved this by including in its intake members of national groups not
previously considered white enough to gain entry to Australia, it did so
withtheconvictionthat,infact,allthesegroupswerereallywhite.White-
ness was equated with cultural similarity. Multiculturalism’s emphasis on
inclusion in the first place only impacted certain groups, those already
identified as white. Official multiculturalism was a backwards-looking
policy at a time when Australia was being forced by the winds of global
change to end its White Australia policy, or what was left of it after it
had become increasingly etiolated through the 1960s. Australia in the
second decade of the twenty-first century has a very different and more
radically diverse population mix from that during the height of official
multiculturalism in the 1980s.
As a consequence of its neoliberal restructuring, Australia is now
also a nation-state pervaded by exclusion and precarity. Surveillance as
apopulationmanagementtechnologyhasbeennormalised.Thestatehas
increasing power thanks to laws which in other circumstances would be