Migrancy, Multiculturalism and Whiteness: Re-charting Core Identities in Australia

Abstract

Recent debates in Australia on Asian immigration, Indigenous reconciliation and multiculturalism have been accompanied by a re-emergence of racism after a quarter century of multicultural policy. In reflecting on current attempts to make sense of these debates, we argue that two issues tend to be ignored. The first relates to the difficulty Australians have in bringing an everyday awareness of difference into a vision of national community. This difficulty, we argue, arises from the ways in which this vision is constructed in terms of whiteness, at the same time as claiming to be non-racial. The other issue relates to the fact that the modernist vocabulary of nation, language and culture is unable to express the complexities of national identity in colonial settler societies such as Australia, where the core culture is produced by migrancy. We draw on a pilot study on the construction of whiteness in contemporary Australia to illustrate these points.