Racializing Babylon: Settler Whiteness and the "New Racism"

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s scholars from disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and film studies have been engaged in an attempt at theorizing the role played by whiteness in the formation of dominant subjectivities. 1 Specifically, these theorists have suggested that most white people experience their whiteness as intangible, universal, or transparent, and they find whiteness to be represented accordingly in literature, film, and other media. This essay will explore these issues from a perspective previously unexamined in these theorizations, that of the postcolonial white settler. I will make an intervention into these predominantly British and American analyses of whiteness from the perspective of settler studies and examine how settlers, by way of an analysis of the Australian novelist David Malouf's prizewinning work Remembering Babylon, attempt to define themselves as white subjects; that is, how they represent and construct whiteness in general and, importantly, a sense of their own whiteness in particular in literature. Whiteness is produced in contemporary settler texts in ways different from those identified in the representations of whiteness examined by other critics. Specifically I am arguing that in contemporary white settler texts whiteness is not portrayed as unraced, transparent, or neutral, but rather is racialized or marked. And this desire to mark or differentiate whiteness in these settler texts is part of a general valorization of racial and cultural difference which far from benefiting indigenous and racial others through a respect for difference, conforms instead to ideologies of what Pierre-André Taguieff and Etienne Balibar have called the "new racism." 2