Testing citizen identities: Australian migrants and the Australian values debate

In this paper I explore how recent public debates about Australian values impact on the everyday lives of migrants preparing to become naturalised Australian citizens. Framed through the perspective of governmentality, I combine textual analyses of government documents relating to the Australian citizenship test with ethnographies of recently-arrived migrants in order to demonstrate how political practices related to the conferral of Australian citizenship link and interconnect with the production of migrant subjectivities. In this way, I explore what aspiring citizens think about Australian values and how they contest, accept and negotiate these demands on them to adopt the Australian way of life. The analysis suggests that migrants in this study presented multiple and complex ways of being model Australian citizens. They drew on popular national myths about Australianness promoted in citizenship test resources but they also produced alternative subjectivities that promoted identification with everyday multiculturalism as central to living a happy and prosperous life in Australia.     

Fratricide identities: the land conflict between indigenous Leco and peasant unions in Apolo,Bolivia

This article explores processes of identity-building and claims-making by rural social groups in the context of recent multicultural and plurinational reforms in Bolivia, focusing on an analysis of the narrative apparatus that underpins a paradigmatic land conflict between an indigenous organization and a peasant union in the Bolivian Amazon. The institutional shift that characterized the country after Evo Morales’ election has been reflected and absorbed at the local level. Here, however, the new claims for recognition cannot be understood only through the –often abused – lenses of ‘resistance struggle’, ‘cultural oppression’ and ‘political discrimination of minorities’. In fact, these claims are the result of a complex interaction between institutional changes, and social actors’ ability to respond to them, proposing powerful narratives that provide society and individuals with new shared meanings and mechanisms of self-identification.     

Postcolonial guilt and national identity: historical injustice and the Australian settler state

In nations with a record of historical injustice, guilt about the past is deeply implicated in both efforts towards reconciliation and the construction of national identity. This is as true in notionally postcolonial nations, where past injustice is often denied or avoided, as it is in situations where conflict and injustice have been more recent, overt or visible to the rest of the world. Taking the Australian case as an example, this article considers the dimensions of historical collective guilt, and explores the implications of that guilt for contemporary national identity in postcolonial nations. It argues that until a nation is able to deal with social psychological barriers to addressing historical injustice, it is likely to construct and maintain a narrow and defensive form of nationalism.     

The politics of indigeneity,identity and representation in literature from north Australia's Gulf Country

The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright's novels Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground-breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright's work arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known yet, we argue, of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.     

Indigenous identity construction: enacted upon us,or within us

ABSTRACT

This commentary essay questions, theorizes, explores and grapples with the phenomenon of the creation of racial, social and cultural identity: in childhood as Native American identity is negotiated from others; and in adulthood as Native identity is constructed from within. ‘Indigenous Identity Construction: Enacted upon Us, or Within Us?’ is a commentary piece focused around Native American identity and how it is formed both through childhood and into adulthood. I analyze and interpret my experiences and understanding of my identity formation as an indigenous person- which usually is left out of the socio-political notions of modernity. Conceptualizations from ‘othering’ racial identities are discussed along with indigenous ontologies constructed within land and water. Through metaphorically revisiting past racializing incidents this piece continues working through the idea of othering and induction into whiteness in childhood, but also focuses on how indigenous identities might be constructed and sustained in adulthood. Efforts to model the indigenous assertion of self-determination and decolonizing the mind was used to re-present thoughts on the construction of Native American identity     

The legacy of racism and Indigenous Australian identity within education

It may be argued that the emerging discourses focusing on the social, emotional, educational, and economic disadvantages identified for Australia’s First Peoples (when compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts) are becoming increasingly dissociated with an understanding of the interplay between historical and current trends in racism. Additionally, and if not somewhat related to this critique, it can be suggested that the very construction of research from a Western perspective of Indigenous identity (as opposed to identities) and ways of being are deeply entwined within the undertones of epistemological racism still prevalent today. It is the purpose of this article to move beyond the overreliance of outside-based understanding Western epistemologies, and to explore not only the complex nature of both racism and identity from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, but to also explore the role of education and research in perpetuating varying levels of racism and resistance to Indigenous identity(ies) from a contemporary insider-based standpoint. It is hoped this article will shed some light on the pervasive nature of racism directed at Indigenous Australians, and highlight the need for the continual acceptance, respect, and promotion of Indigenous voices and identities within the educational environment and beyond.     

Australian national identity: empirical research since 1998

The question of what Australian identity means has re-emerged, as globalisation and a concerted political effort to reconstruct an ‘Anglo’ identity have caused uncertainty about ‘who we are’. To explore how Australians conceptualise identity, this paper examines empirical research since Phillips’ [1998. Popular views about Australian identity: Research and analysis. Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 281–302. doi:10.1177/144078339803400305] seminal work synthesising research on Australian identity. Nearly two decades on, a civic/ethno-nationalist distinction and traditional socio-political correlates remain; but less dichotomous constructions are also being explored and more progressive values included. Key differences are found in the increased range of meanings of Australianness, as well as an apparent shift, for some, towards a cosmopolitan identity.     

The roots of black resistance: race,gender and the struggle for urban land rights in Salvador,Bahia, Brazil

In Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, during the past ten years, the city has transformed its historical centre into cultural sites for leisure tourism. This process has included projects of ‘slum clearance’, negatively impacting black communities who have historically occupied these areas. In this essay, I present an ethnographic account of Gamboa de Baixo, a black coastal community in the centre of Salvador, and its political movement against urban renewal programmes. Specifically, I focus on the articulation of racial and gender politics in black women's grassroots activism against land expulsion and for access to material resources. This case in Salvador unearths one aspect of institutional racism in Brazil and the formation of an anti‐black racism resistance movement. Resistance to urban renewal plans in Salvador demonstrates how struggles for urban land rights are a crucial part of engaging in the broader national and international politics of race. In black communities in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, urban land and territorial rights are the local idioms of black resistance.     

Whiteness and national identity: teacher discourses in Australian primary schools

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision and a quasi-critical approach. We conclude that the wider education system needs to develop a more formal curriculum structure that guides teachers in developing a better awareness of the power of white normativity, and to critically and explicitly counter discourse and practice that centres whiteness as foundational to dominant conceptualisations of national identity.     

The multiethnic state-building dilemma: national and ethnic minorities' identities in the Crimea

This article examines the process of national identity formation among ethnic minorities in the Crimea – specifically, how a new common identity develops in the system of existing identities, what meaning group identities have for different minorities group and how this process influences attitudes and stereotypes toward the ingroup and outgroup. Based on surveys in the Crimea, results show that formation of a common national and regional identity leads to developing of positive stereotypes toward members of other groups, who now are involved in a new group identity, but also is connected with formation of negative attitudes and stereotypes toward other groups. The meaning of identity depends on its position in the system of identities and can be used as a criterion for early warning of conflicts.     

Culture and identity: two different notions

A clear, precise conceptual distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ is an essential precondition for analyzing social processes. The anthropological concept of ‘identity’ has been built up over time and enriched by studies on interethnic relationships, ethnic borders and ethnicity. The objective of this essay is to add to an already well-defined concept of culture by incorporating decisive contributions from theories on the nation. Culture and nation are not only highly complex theoretical notions with a long history; they both deal with heterogeneous and conflictive entities. The essay asserts that culture and identity allude to analytically different aspects of social processes. No relationship between the two can be presupposed or generalized to fit all cases. It is necessary to analyze cultural and identitary aspects separately.     

试论市场经济体制下的民族文化与民族关系

民族传统文化,不仅对本民族内部成员具有内聚性,而且随着时代的发展,会不断注入新鲜的血液,在发展社会主义民族关系中具有举足轻重的作用;保护和利用宝贵的民族文化遗产,由静态变为动态,给民族关系的发展赋予时代意义;市场经济体制下人员交流,互学语言,族际通婚,无疑拉近了民族间的关系;市场经济体制对文化与民族关系会有一些负面影响,处理不好,会酿成不安定因素,必须正视。     

Gendered beings,gendered discourses: the gendering of race,colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism in three Zimbabwean novels

This article aims to explore the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendering affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life. It relies on the Gramscian concept of hegemony in terms of how it refers to gender, particularly masculinities. The selected texts, A Son of the Soil by Wilson Katiyo, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Bones by Chenjerai Hove, cover the colonial period from the moment of contact to the early post independence period. The article links the gendered nature of colonialism to the gendered aspects of anti colonial nationalism and shows how the two existed in an oppositional yet ambivalent relationship. This is also manifest in the schizophrenia of the post independence state in modeling itself after its predecessor, its anti colonial rhetoric notwithstanding.     

当代台湾的“原住民”与民族问题

当代台湾少数民族和民族问题 ,是大陆民族学界亟须深入研究的课题。本文以 2 0世纪 80年代初开始的台湾少数民族“正名”运动为切入点 ,分析了台湾少数民族经济社会生活的现状和问题 ,就台湾少数民族的政治诉求及其表现在民族问题话语中的误区进行了探讨 ,揭露了“台独”势力利用“原住民”问题分裂祖国的图谋 ,认为台湾一些人对所谓“南岛民族”的炒作实质上就是要宣扬服务于“台独”目标的“泛南岛民族主义”。     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

Negotiating postcolonial Eurasian identities and national belonging in global-city Singapore

ABSTRACT

A racial classification regime, partly derived from colonial race categories that solidified during the British Empire, remains a key governance strategy in postcolonial Singapore, sorting citizens into the categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (CMIO). This racial grid continues to be a simplification of the actual complexity of lived identities and experiences, particularly for people of mixed descent. In this context, we explore the contemporary meanings and resonances of racial identity and national belonging as negotiated among members of a historic mixed-descent community – the Eurasians – in the context of a nation-state built on an institutionally fixed racial template. As a community, Eurasians are commonly attributed to the presence and mixing of especially Dutch, Portuguese and British – but also other Europeans – with an equally variegated palette of Asian cultures, since the 16th century. Based on 30 biographical interviews with self- identified Eurasians of two generations, this paper examines how individual and collective narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to the emergence of potentially new hierarchies of racial belonging with the arrival of new migration and the rise of international marriage in globalizing times. Given the lived reality of an expanding range of ‘race’ identities of different permutations and combinations, the politics of choice is played out between countervailing forces which draw racialized boundaries around the community more tightly on the one hand, and liberalize claims to racial and national belonging on the basis of self-identification on the other.     

走向民粹化的族群政治--20世纪80年代以来的台湾原住民运动与原住民政策研究

台湾的原住民运动兴起于上世纪 80年代初期。在族群化、民粹化的政治背景下 ,台湾的原住民运动从其产生之初起就混杂着民粹的因素。原住民运动在中前期发展阶段 ,在民粹手段和社会动员等方面与台湾的政治反对派互相借重 ,并形成策略互动。而台湾原住民的“正名”诉求则是由国民党籍的原住民“民意代表”和原住民运动相互配合得以实现的 ,台湾的原住民政策也由此发生了明显的改变。在“正名”实现后 ,台湾的原住民运动开始分裂并趋于衰微 ,但同时愈加民粹化     

Everyday inter-ethnic tensions and discomfort in a culturally diverse Australian workplace

Australian workplaces are increasingly becoming culturally diverse. As a space of involuntary encounter of racial difference, multicultural workplaces are significant sites for understanding how workers deal with cultural difference. Involuntary cross-cultural encounters are a facet of living with cultural difference which can produce discomfort, tension and conflict in the workplace. The study of workplace social relations has traditionally focused on practices of racial discrimination. In this paper, we shift the focus to examine different modes of negative inter-ethnic interactions at work through the lens of discomfort. It suggests that analysing tension and conflict arising in multicultural workplaces as racially motivated or simply racist fails to capture other factors that adversely affect inter-ethnic interaction. This paper presents findings from a research into workplace interaction in the Australian employment services providers to emphasise that changing work conditions and increasing cultural diversity have profound impact on the workers’ experiences of workplace relations.     

The Conservative Party and devolved national identities: Scotland and Wales compared

This article focuses on the role of national identity in the behaviour and performance of the Scottish Conservative Party – the main voice of opposition to devolution in the 1990s. In particular, it will address the apparent flat-lining of its popular vote, arguing that this is a direct consequence of the party doggedly adhering to a more traditional form of ‘unionist nationalism’. This can be contrasted with Wales, where the party has adapted well to devolution, and enjoyed a steady improvement in its electoral performances.