Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship: Rethinking the Nation 113865972X, 9781138659728

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Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship

This book examines claims for recognition of cultural difference from immigrant and Indigenous minorities, highlighting the ways in which they intersect with ideas of national community. Busbridge argues that there is an important, albeit underexplored, relationship between nation and multicultural politics of recognition. Drawing on the Australian context, the book explores how nation features as a productive, if somewhat ambivalent, discursive resource in contemporary Muslim and Aboriginal struggles to be recognised. In demanding recognition, minorities enter into the business of ‘making the nation’ by positing alternative conceptions of national identity, culture and belonging that are more attentive to their differences and claims. This dynamic is engaged as an expression of ‘postcolonial citizenship’. Postcolonial citizenship is imagined in terms of the ways in which minority groups actualise multicultural realities through rewriting ideas of national community. It underlines the critical importance of revising the power relations that deem some groups ‘more national’ and others less so – and which, in Western multicultural societies, are typically tied to notions of the ‘West’ and its ‘Others’. This book is an important conceptual, theoretical and political intervention that brings postcolonialism and multiculturalism into dialogue on the increasingly potent issues of nation and national identity. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of sociology, politics, postcolonial studies, culture, identity and nation. Rachel Busbridge is Research Associate of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Postcolonial Politics Edited by: Pal Ahluwalia, University of South Australia Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths, University of London Leela Gandhi, University of Chicago Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths, University of London For a full list of titles please see: https://www.routledge.com/Postcolonial-Politics/book-series/PP ‘Postcolonial Politics’ is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of ‘politics’ is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the ‘New Humanities’ have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Said’s binary of ‘Europe and its other’ introduced us to a ‘style of thought’ that was as much political as it was cultural as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being, A new, broader and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to ‘think’ politics through postcolonial theory, and to ‘do’ postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications. Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read ‘difference’ concretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.

Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship Rethinking the Nation Rachel Busbridge

Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship Rethinking the Nation Rachel Busbridge

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Rachel Busbridge The right of Rachel Busbridge to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-65972-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-31562-002-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

For Helen

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Contents

Preface

xi

1

Rethinking the nation

1

2

Conceptualising nation: Discourse, democracy and postcolonial debate

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3

Postcolonial politics of recognition?

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4

Contingent universals and shifting particulars: Reorienting recognition struggles

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5 6 7

Beyond clashing civilisations: Muslim revisions of recognition in popular culture

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Aboriginal Australians and recognition politics: Reconciliation, apology, sovereignty

137

Thinking postcolonial citizenship

169

Index

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Somewhere between the local and the global there must be a place for [the] nation state and indeed for the myths and dreams of national or ethnic collectivity that condition our political predicament even as the relationship between the local and the global is itself transformed. Paul Gilroy (1990) ‘Nationalism, History and Ethnic Absolutism’, History Workshop Journal 30(1): 114–120

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Preface

My interest in this book is how multicultural politics of recognition are entangled with ideas of national identity, culture and belonging. Specifically, I argue that cultural minorities demanding recognition of their difference are engaged in a process of rearticulating imaginaries of national community, disrupting and unsettling the hegemonic centrality of the imagined national – a dynamic I seek to elucidate through the idea of postcolonial citizenship. It is rare to begin a scholarly book with an admission of uncertainty. When I began writing, however, I admit that a gnawing feeling of uneasiness regularly plagued me. In grounding the notion of postcolonial citizenship in the imagined community of the nation, was my vision of postcolonial politics too conservative, too limited to what currently exists? Postcolonialism is a broad and decidedly heterogeneous field of inquiry, but its take on questions of nation is all too often a negative one. For many postcolonial theorists, the imbrications of nationalism with colonialism, imperialism and Western modernity are regarded as nullifying any emancipatory potential. Likewise, the idea of nation as a political community grounded in cultural commonality is widely seen as counter to diversity and innately oppressive or assimilatory of minority groups. If we are to imagine postcolonial citizenship, would it thus not be better to bring it explicitly into the realm of the global, the transnational, the cosmopolitan? Colonialism, after all, produced a world in which the idea of a homogenous and neatly bounded national culture is exposed as illusory, and perhaps also a bit delusional. Now, more than ever before, the most pressing social and political questions facing us are global in character and seem to demand solidarities and alliances that extend well beyond the borders of the nation-state. But then 2016 happened. Brexit, Trump, the rise of the European far-right. My country, Australia, stepped up its finely tuned art of dog-whistle politics, instituted a national allegiance bill. Nationalism returned to the political stage with a vengeance. Our nation, our people. Foreigners out. Traitors banished. Everywhere people are unsettled by the feeling that we are on the cusp of a new Zeitgeist. If globalisation has made the world small, we can beat it by going even smaller. A time of protectionism. An era of isolation. Deportations. Visa restrictions. Criminal registries for immigrants. People in

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no-man’s land, being shot with tear gas through razor wire. An age of polarisation where we may live in our little echo-chambers should we choose to do so, never having to confront an opposing opinion or engage with people who don’t see the world in the same way we do. In this world of populism matched with nationalism into which we seem to be dipping a toe, the idea of ‘we the people’ has been hijacked by demagogues. By racists. By people who see difference not as an inevitable fact of social life, but a threat best contained and, if possible, expelled altogether. If this emergent Zeitgeist has reminded us of anything, it is just how vital – and fragile – a public sphere that allows contestation over the ‘we’ of national community is to democratic politics. The nation, once again, has become re-energised as a site of democratic struggle and claims for social justice. ‘Not in my name’, we declare. Not in my name will the Australian government continue to allow refugees to languish in off-shore processing facilities on Manus Island and the like. Not in my name will Muslims be detained in airports, barred entry from the United States. Not in my name will my fellow nationals be demonised, told they don’t belong. In such a context, the choice between the national and the global (or the international, or the transnational, or the cosmopolitan) is revealed to be a false one. Nations are not self-contained entities, but garner their identities, values, ideals and cultural and political points of reference from elsewhere. Moreover, this choice is revealed to be a problematic one. The politics of the day would have us believe that nationalists are at war with so-called cosmopolitans; one group is made up of the losers of globalisation, the other are its winners. In this regard, the denunciation, dismissal or categorical rejection of nation would only seem to feed into the polarisation of politics. For me, the critical impetus behind postcolonial politics is its commitment to hybridity, to permeable borders and boundaries, to exchange, to the relationality of all cultures and identities. Postcolonial politics is a method of interpretation and a modality of praxis, which is unwilling to accept the presumed naturalness of difference. It is to be committed to tracing and interrogating unequal relations of power that shape subjectivities and social realities but not to reinstate them by affording them ontological primacy. Postcolonial politics seeks out changes and transformations, sites of agency, resistance and subversion and takes them as equally engaged in making the world we live in. And contemporary postcolonial politics, I believe, would be well served by turning these insights to the realm of nation. This entails remaining suspicious of nationalist claims to homogeneity, while simultaneously exploring the discontinuities, contradictions and ambiguities of national culture and the ways in which it is transformed through acts of subversion and struggles for social justice. What postcolonial politics thus requires is a willingness to rethink the nation: to engage its democratic potentialities, capabilities to acknowledge difference and diversity and powerful resonance in the modern era as the dominant form of political community. As I see it, the challenge now facing the social relevance and political

Preface xiii saliency of postcolonial theory is how to build a hegemonic bloc that appreciates cultural diversity as integral and not counter to national community. A hegemonic bloc which understands that the meanings of nation are not set in stone, but that we work them out collectively as part of the project of living together. A hegemonic bloc that protects the rights of people everywhere not just to cross borders, but to genuinely belong. This book is but a small effort at actualising this vision of postcolonial politics, but I hope it is a valid one. In laying out the ways in which minority groups rewrite ideas of national community as they claim recognition of their difference, postcolonial citizenship can be considered a more local expression of the postcolonial political project of refashioning the world to make it more hospitable to difference. Postcolonial citizenship challenges, at the level of the national, the idea that the world is for, and made by, some people while the others must simply live in it. The focus on nation is thus not a counterproductive one from a postcolonial perspective. On the contrary, it helps us to ground the postcolonial political project and renew it with urgency. Postcolonial theory, in general, is wont to approach the world in grand terms – the grandest of which is no doubt ‘the West’ and ‘non-West’. Returning to the nation as a product of globalisation and reading struggles within it as reflective of and embedded in global dynamics does not just facilitate empirically richer analyses of contemporary colonial imaginaries and the variety of ways in which people resist them. It also, perhaps, affords us the type of rootedness that allows for the soaring of imagination. *** Any project of the magnitude of a book incurs a huge amount of debt, especially one that has taken as long to come to fruition as this one has. Elizabeth Porter and Rodney Fopp supervised what was to become the foundation of this book. Joe Camilleri and Michalis Michael offered comments and advice on some very early chapter drafts. Chapter 5 emerged out of an article that Sven Schottmann very kindly invited me to submit. My short visiting fellowship in CIDE in Mexico City allowed me to present an earlier version of Chapter 6 to a very engaged and rigorous audience. The vast majority of the book was written while I was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. My sincere appreciation to Schirin Amir-Moazami for agreeing to host me, and to Sonja Eising for her warm and always professional administrative support, including access to funds for copy-editing and indexing. I cannot thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enough for their support over the two and a half years I was in Germany. Without their confidence in me as an independent researcher I would have never had the time to develop the ideas in this book as thoroughly as I have. My two-month stay at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law in the Basque Country was a wonderful occasion to work on the manuscript while enjoying a charming village,

xiv Preface magnificent mountain walks and the company of master’s students and other visiting researchers. Sian Supski did a fabulous job copy-editing the manuscript, and I am very appreciative of the time she took to give me more substantial feedback – addressing this may have required more work on my behalf, but it improved the quality of the manuscript considerably. Peter Chambers, Ben Gook and Samuel Mueller read chapters and very graciously offered me feedback, comments, advice and even a spot of editing. My father, Gary, housed me during the final push and gave me ample space to finalise everything; my brother Chris offered a sympathetic ear. I feel blessed that two of my favourite people also happen to be my two most immediate family members. Above all, Raul Sanchez Urribarri engaged with this book at every step along the way. Without his support, encouragement and intellectual acumen it would be only half of what it is. I am indebted to him that the manuscript ever saw completion, along with everything else. Parts of Chapters 4 and 5 were published as ‘Contingent universals and shifting particulars: Muslim revisions of recognition in Australia’, borderlands e-journal, 11(1), 2012. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published as ‘“It’s just your turn”: Performing national identity and Muslim Australian popular culture’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 24(3): 459–77, 2013. My thanks go to the respective editors of these journals, Anthony Burke and David Thomas, for their permission to reproduce material. My sincere appreciation to Oxford University Press, and Paul Gilroy himself, who granted me permission to use the Gilroy quote as an epigraph. The dissertation that constituted the earliest articulation of this book I dedicated to my Granmar, Lauraine Charlesworth, who passed away during my doctoral studies. Never would I have imagined that I would dedicate this book to my mum, Helen, who died only five years (almost to the day) later. It was my mum who was by my side for most of the years I’ve been developing the ideas that find expression in this book, and her support was grounded in that perfect motherly combination of endless patience and strategically doledout exasperation. I know she would be deeply proud to finally see the book in print. My mum will not get to read my book now; though I doubt she would have thumbed through more than a few pages. She is in this book anyway. Every resource that I’ve drawn upon to bring this book to completion – the late nights, the persistence to push on even when the task ahead seemed endless and, yes, the multiple glasses of wine – I got from her.

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Rethinking the nation

From recognition to postcolonial politics In 2015, a group calling itself Reclaim Australia emerged onto the Australian political scene, holding a number of rallies across the country to protest the threat supposedly posed by radical Islam to the national way of life. While the rallies themselves were mostly disorganised and reasonably small, typically facing off against counter-rallies double or triple in size, Reclaim Australia nevertheless received an inordinate amount of attention in the media and popular discourse. Their Australian flag-bedecked protests were perhaps the most overt nationalist spectacle witnessed in the country since the Cronulla Riots some ten years earlier,1 with the participation of a number of aggressive young white men – often with flags wrapped around their faces – worryingly reminiscent of those who crowded the beach in 2005, launching bottles at police and attacking passers-by of Middle Eastern appearance. Protestors held up signs like ‘Yes Australia, no Sharia’ and ‘Immigration is the elephant in the room’, blasted songs by classic Australian bands like Midnight Oil and Goanna2 and donned national symbols like the Union Jack and the Southern Cross; some even dressed up as tubes of Vegemite, the ubiquitous Australian breakfast spread. A handful of politicians attended the events, most prominently the populist nationalist Pauline Hanson, whose recent re-entry into mainstream Australian politics was facilitated by an anti-Islam platform. For the most part, however, Reclaim Australia has framed itself as a movement by ordinary Australians for ordinary Australians, concerned about the damage being wrought to the nation by Islam and politically correct ‘bleeding heart Lefties’ supportive of immigration. A real Australian, according to the Reclaimers, is one who treasures and respects Australian laws and culture. As much as Reclaim Australia has been careful not to afford this any explicit ethnic and racial content (their Facebook page proudly declares that people of European, Asian, Middle Eastern and Indigenous backgrounds are Australian insofar as they love the country), their proclaimed ethnic-inclusiveness is belied by a heralding of a Judaeo-Christian heritage, as well as the periodic involvement of white ultra-nationalist groups with neo-Nazi ties, such as the United Patriots Front.

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Reclaim Australia naturally garnered a great deal of discord. Counter-rallies, variously made up of anti-racists, pro-multiculturalists, trade unionists and members of radical left groups like Antifa and the Socialist Alliance, were vigorous in their opposition and at times directly combative, with rival crowds facing off through a police picket. Some counter-protestors made a mockery of the very thing the Reclaimers professed to be reclaiming, brandishing signs in the black, yellow and red of the Aboriginal flag with ‘Not yours to reclaim’ and ‘Reclaim Aboriginal Australia from mining companies’. Members of the Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance burnt an Australian flag, extending their protest from the national symbols claimed by Reclaim Australia to the state itself (Green Left Weekly, 2015). Outside of the rallies, public opposition to Reclaim Australia’s vision of national identity flourished from all quarters. Musicians whose songs had been played at Reclaim Australia protests denounced their co-option by the group and forbade their future use. Jimmy Barnes, for instance, objecting to the use of his song Khe Sanh in Reclaim Australia promotional material, declared ‘the Australia I belong to and love is a tolerant Australia. A place that is open and giving. It is a place that embraces all sorts of different people, in fact is made stronger by the diversity of its people’ (Herald Sun, 2015). Various social and political commentators lamented the mainstreaming of right-wing nationalism and its tacit facilitation by the government’s politicisation of immigration and national security issues, particularly counter-terrorism efforts at home and overseas. Academic and politician Anne Aly juxtaposed the politics represented by Reclaim Australia with the type of nation ‘we’ deserve, which ‘stands together, not apart, in the face of adversity’ (2015); writer Randa Abdel-Fattah called for a different love of country that would inspire defiance of racism, a willingness to confront national complicity in injustice and a commitment to forging a ‘healthy political realm’ (2015). Civil society actors, too, weighed in on the debate. Welcome to Australia, a multiculturalist organisation initially founded by Christian pastor Brad Chilcott, mobilised the #saywelcome campaign, which seeks to promote ‘respect, compassion and inclusiveness’ as the ‘true Australian spirit’.3 Adelaide artist Peter Drew crowdfunded two poster projects to be pasted around the country, one with the bolded slogan ‘Real Australians Say Welcome’ and another with a picture of the early 20th century Afghan cameleer Monga Khan emblazoned with the word ‘Aussie’.4 The politics of Reclaim Australia are particularly concerning, not least because they are implicated in what seems to be a global revival of populist nationalisms which draw on civilizational creeds of ‘us’ and ‘them’, spout exclusionary and protectionist doctrines and feed the politicisation of cultural diversity and migration along with the militarisation of border security. While there is good reason to believe that the movement has lost much of its initial momentum, with its reputation tarnished by a visible neo-Nazi presence at rallies and communities declaring a moratorium on engaging with similar protests from splinter organisations (Brisbane Times, 2016), Reclaim Australia

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nevertheless remains representative of the dark potentiality of nationalism and its dangerous xenophobic predilections. I do not begin with the group, however, to impugn its politics or cry foul on its uses and abuses of nation. Rather, I begin with Reclaim Australia to make a far more general point: nation, as an ‘imagined political community’ (Anderson, 1991: 6), is a site of contestation and competing claims. It is easy to associate the discourse of nationhood with groups like Reclaim Australia, just as it is easy to do so in the context of Donald Trump’s pledge to ‘Make America Great Again’, UKIP in the United Kingdom or Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. These big-N nationalisms are loud, they employ the language and symbols of nation and they proclaim to speak exclusively on its behalf. They also represent all our worst fears of nationalism as a doctrine and nation as a concept, wielding the rhetoric of national unity and authenticity in an exclusivist and oppressive way that is demanding of affiliation and assimilation. Yet, these flag-waving folk with their sea of bright colours do not tell the whole story of nation, nor do their claims to representation go unchallenged. Those weighing in on the Reclaim Australia furore likewise employ the language and symbols of nationhood, whether presenting their own visions of what a ‘real’ Australian is or should be, imagining a different type of national community or even just by speaking of a national ‘we’. These interventions similarly appeal to rhetoric of national commonality in order to garner their ‘symbolic force’ (Bhabha, 1990: 1). The contents of this commonality, however, differ quite markedly, as do the political ideals they mobilise, which are far more benign than those of Reclaim Australia and their counterparts. They may not be as ostentatious, but such interventions do similar work in the business of ‘making the nation’. They, too, imagine what ‘it’ is and who ‘we’ are, and they importantly show that claims to nation are never fixed or settled. To the contrary, any claim to represent the ‘true’ nation will always be contested. What the nation ‘is’ is perhaps best located in these contestations and the ways in which they vie for the crown of ultimate representativeness. In this book, I am interested in how the idea of nation is woven into political discourse, the uses to which it is put and the struggles it inaugurates and perpetuates. That is to say, my interest is what we might call little-n nationalisms: how nationalism as a discursive formation that structures conceptions of identity, belonging and culture (Calhoun, 2007) shapes social reality and understandings of the political. To engage these little-n nationalisms is to acknowledge the essential contestability of nation, as well as the powerful ways in which the idea of nation remains resonant in contemporary life as the dominant form of political community. This is not to say that nation is the only marker of political community, of course. The era of globalisation has made possible new ways of creating and locating identity, belonging and community outside of the national paradigm, and many scholars have accordingly sought to move their analyses into the realm of the transnational, the diasporic or the cosmopolitan. There is no

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doubt that globalisation has profoundly changed both the contours and contents of nation. Given the resurgence of big-N nationalisms, however, and the concomitant temptation to write off nation as a dark and exclusionary force, there is an urgent need to engage the multiplicity of ways in which little-n nationalisms shape contemporary politics – lest we leave it to the Reclaims, Trumps and UKIPs of the world. Moreover, as much as it may seem that nation has little to offer a globalised world and that our hopes for democracy are best set beyond the borders of the nation-state (e.g. Spivak, 2003), we risk throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. It would not only be pre-emptive but perhaps a little contemptuous of the work nation does in organising social and political life to suggest that it is no longer relevant, or should no longer be relevant, to progressive and inclusionary politics. As I suggest throughout this book, nation does not just continue to provide the ‘framework and language of almost all political discussion’ (Harris, 1990: 269), but can in fact play a productive role in political discourse as a rubric for democratic inclusion and belonging – even if we must always remain assiduously wary of its potential for abuse. Paying attention to the variety of ways in which nation figures and is contested in political struggles allows us to not only develop a more nuanced account of its contemporary manifestations, but also to strip problematic nationalisms of their claims to exclusive representativeness. The façade of national unity always belies the serious contestations that take place under its rubric, and while this contestation is invariably conditioned by certain limits, these limits too are contestable. This book works from the premise that the tendency to gloss over this contestability is testament to the power of nationalist rhetoric, and may just be complicit in it insofar as it tacitly reinforces essentialist ideas of nationhood. It is only by coming to an understanding of the persistence of nation in our social and political imaginaries that we may hope to comprehend the type of work it does for people of different political persuasions, as well as harness its potential for democratic politics.

Multicultural politics of recognition My particular focus in this book is how ideas of nation are woven into what I call multicultural politics of recognition as they take place in culturally diverse Western societies. This is perhaps somewhat of a counterintuitive route, given that the representation of national unity is only made possible by the repression or suppression of certain differences and typically at the expense of minorities. Indeed, the drive towards homogenisation that is central to nationalist rhetoric is, in significant ways, counter to the cause of difference and diversity, although, as the varieties of ‘multicultural’ nation-building efforts across the Western world demonstrate (Uberoi, 2008), it is not incompatible with it. On the one hand, nationalism as a discursive formation is directly ‘implicated in the widespread if not problematic treatment of societies as bounded, integral wholes with distinctive identities, cultures and

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institutions’, an imaginary that often excludes the presence of minority groups and makes the existence of societal diversity difficult to acknowledge or accept (Calhoun, 2007: 40). On the other hand, minority groups have suffered the most at the hands of state nation-building practices and nationalist rhetoric, which typically privilege ‘members of the majority culture’ and render minority differences (such as languages and cultural practices) precarious (Kymlicka, 2002: 348). It is thus not surprising that much scholarship has tended to focus on the ways in which minority groups are negatively affected by nationalist discourse, whether they are its explicit targets (like Muslims in Reclaim Australia’s platform) or its implicit exclusions. Alternatively, scholarship has considered how the rapid diversification of societies combined with the uncertainties of globalisation have shored up exclusionary discourses of nation and national identity, where certain minorities are deemed part of a wider undermining or destruction of ‘authentic’ national culture. These are not just worthy lines of inquiry but crucially important. However, one of the implications that emerge from them is that minorities are somehow positioned in opposition to nation, drawing a line between an imagined national centre and a minority margin (or margins) – a presumption that simply cannot hold, given the rapid diversification of Western societies over the past few decades. This book suggests that exploring how minorities, particularly those at the national periphery, employ and put to use the discourse of nation in their struggles for recognition allows us to gain an alternative insight into the workings of nation, its discursive pervasiveness and essential contestability. In so doing, I by no means intend to submerge or assimilate minority differences into the national imaginary, nor do I mean to suggest that minority struggles are somehow secondary or epiphenomenal to wider national politics. Rather, my key interest is how minority struggles for recognition work in and across different discursive registers; the national is but one, but I suggest that it is a potentially revealing one for gaining a sense of the nuances of struggles surrounding difference as well as their wider resonances. Multicultural politics of recognition refer to claims from minority groups for the public acknowledgement, affirmation and esteeming of their distinctive identities, which can range from challenges to dominant patterns of cultural representation to demands for the institution of group-specific rights to accommodate unique cultural practices, traditions and beliefs. They thus have significant overlap with ‘identity politics’ and ‘the politics of difference’ (Young, 1990). The theoretical paradigm of recognition has come to be a matter of both debate and controversy in recent years, with various scholars challenging its potential to promote freedom and equality for minority groups. This book, however, works from the contention that political theories of recognition (e.g. Taylor, 1994; Honneth, 1995; Fraser, 1997) offer rich resources for illuminating the dynamics of difference-related struggles. Firstly, as much as theorists of recognition disagree on what the affirmation of difference entails, they are in broad agreement that what compels such struggles

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is the experience of ‘misrecognition’; that is, having one’s difference disrespected or denigrated, which includes stereotyping, inferiorising (rendering certain cultural differences inferior) and various patterns of social exclusion (Thompson and Yar, 2011: 171–2). In this regard, theories of recognition speak as much to the social conditions that compel struggles for recognition as they do to those struggles themselves. Secondly, and relatedly, political theories of recognition are well equipped to demonstrate how multicultural demands for recognition are never purely in the service of difference but are instead implicated in, and seek to shape, wider horizons of justice and morality. As such, they offer us a means to reflect upon how the affirmation of difference is entangled with the rearticulation of political identity, that is, who ‘we’ are and what defines us as a political community. This book argues that conceptions of nation play an important role in contemporary experiences of misrecognition in Western multicultural contexts. Specifically, I argue that ideas of national belonging are critical in framing minority claims for the recognition of difference in culturally diverse societies, insofar as exclusion from or marginalisation in dominant regimes of national belonging constitute a specific form of social disrespect, insult and contempt. National belonging refers to the feeling of being ‘at home’ in the nation and all those things that come along with feeling at home – comfort, security, continuity and a sense that one can speak and be heard.5 It thus has an affective dimension, wherein it relates to the hopes, longings and desires of attachment (Probyn, 1996), and a political dimension, where it denotes a sense of the rightfulness of presence and the legitimacy of participation. National belonging is patterned by certain indices that construct the inclusion or exclusion of different people, groups and social categories and is connected to prototypes of the ‘imagined national’. After all, as Nira Yuval-Davis (2011: 76) writes, ‘we need a notion of the nation before we can decide if people belong to it or not’. This has significant consequences for minority groups and those deemed not to have (or have enough of) purported ‘national characteristics’, particularly with regard to who may ‘legitimately’ have a say and a stake in the political community of the nation. Through reading the ways in which the language of nation comes to figure in minority struggles for the recognition of difference, I argue that the construction of certain differences as more or less ‘national’ – and the implications of this for conditioning rightful political participation – is an important dimension of the experience of inequality and injustice in culturally diverse societies. There are two further contentions that derive from this argument. The first is that we are unable to separate the claim for the recognition of difference from the national imaginary that helps to shape, position and give meaning to this difference (although, again, not exclusively so). The second is that paying attention to the ways in which minorities invoke the language of nation in their demands for recognition allows us to understand such multicultural politics as actively engaged in contesting the unequal distribution of national belonging, where certain minorities

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are seen as less worthy of shaping the contents and contours of national community and being represented within it. National belonging cuts into but is not synonymous with ideas of national identity and culture. Accordingly, in contesting dominant regimes of national belonging, minority struggles for recognition rearticulate conceptions of national identity and culture as part of an ongoing project of collective self-definition. A significant part of this employment of the language of nation must be seen as deriving simply from the practicalities of politics. As Simone Bignall (2012: 390) suggests, ‘minoritarian claims for recognition are frequently directed at a dominant order; such claims must be articulated in terms that the dominant order can recognise and make sense of ’. Appealing to the nation enables claims for recognition to be articulated in terms that effectively resonate with the status quo, which helps to give them weight, legibility and acceptability. In short, it allows them to be formulated in ways that are more likely to be convincing. As a tactic, the appeal to the status quo might be politically practical, if not necessary. It is also, however, a potentially risky business: if not a double-edged sword, at the very least marred by ambivalence. Majoritarian cultural practices, as Bignall (2012: 390) continues, ‘can often fail to acknowledge minor cultures on their own terms of reference, thereby perpetuating insidious forms of “non-recognition”’. There are typically significant cultural differences between the majority and minority groups positioned at the margins of the nation, and not all of these are compatible or reconcilable; some, like religious and spiritual ontologies, are most certainly irreconcilable. Appealing to the dominant order, in this regard, can compromise the struggle to be recognised on one’s own terms, and may indeed be a mechanism that deepens the very structures that sustain misrecognition in the first place. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest that another part of this invocation of nation in recognition struggles can be read as signalling its politicisation; nation not just a practicality of politics, then, but also its object. In appealing to the nation, minorities do not merely echo the national status quo but also destabilise it, pushing its boundaries, expanding and potentially reconstituting it. The more marginal the group is in the construction of nation and national belonging, the more unsettling such claims may be. Certainly, as I will seek to show, the vision of nation that groups appeal to in their struggles for recognition is not the dominant hegemonic one – even if its exclusions help to shape the background of misrecognition they must negotiate. Instead, groups offer alternative accounts of nation more attentive to their unique claims and particular differences. In other words, they too enter into the business of ‘making the nation’, where they weigh in on discussions of what ‘the nation’ is and who ‘we’ are. While the extent to which these claims may be deemed representative is contextual and dependent on a whole host of different factors, the point stands: in contesting the bounds of national community they also contribute to constructing it, an observation Yuval-Davis (2011: 17–8) makes in relation to the politics of belonging more generally.

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I see this as indicating a ‘democratisation’ of the discourse of nation, where minority groups feel confident not simply to assimilate to the dominant order or accept their ‘difference’ from it, but rather to stake a claim on the nation, deconstructing and demanding the transformation of structures of national belonging which compromise the possibility of participation on one’s own terms. The shift towards a politics of difference, which has happened in the West since the 1960s, has clearly signalled the unwillingness of cultural and other marginalised minorities to be assimilated into the hegemonic cultural and political terms of mainstream society. What I want to underscore is how the politics of difference is explicitly embedded in the creative rearticulation of the imagined national community, specifically, the contents and contours of a shared national identity. Axel Honneth (2012: 93) writes that ‘something in the physical world – be it modes of conduct or institutional circumstances – must change if addressees are to be convinced that they have been recognised in a new manner’. In multicultural politics of recognition, I suggest that the acknowledgement of group specificity in the hegemonic national imaginary affords an important measure of the extent to which minorities feel that they have been recognised. It is not simply a matter of incorporation into or inclusion within the dominant national community, however. As I want to argue in this book, claims for the recognition of difference work to critically contest the lines drawn between an imagined national ‘centre’ and its margins – revealing the ways in which they are produced and conditioned by unequal relations of power. As such, they pursue and negotiate a vision of national community that is better able to fulfil its promise of democratic inclusion, fairness and equal representation as well as the right of participation and interjection. In this book, I approach this intertwining of minority struggles for the recognition of difference and the rearticulation of national community in terms of ‘postcolonial citizenship’.

Postcolonial citizenship: between integration and separation As I seek to develop it, postcolonial citizenship provides a frame for thinking about the dynamics and implications of cultural diversity and multicultural struggles in the West. A number of scholars have similarly noted the value of postcolonial theory for comprehending contemporary practices of citizenship in Western countries, particularly in relation to questions of cultural difference and immigration (e.g. Schueller, 2009; Bosma, 2012; Bosma et al., 2012). Postcolonialism can be broadly understood as a field of study concerned with tracing, engaging and responding to the cultural, political and economic legacies of European colonialism.6 The ‘post’ in postcolonial thus does not signify the end of colonialism per se, even as the formal period of colonialism is now over (Shohat, 1992). Rather, in taking European colonial expansion as coterminous with the development of modernity, postcolonial scholars see the interrelated violence, injustice, exclusion and inequality of colonialism as having decisively shaped the modern world. This includes global geo-political

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and economic systems as well as the construction of modern societies and the relationships between them. Postcolonial citizenship has been employed in a descriptive way to designate how patterns of migration and local contours of cultural diversity are intimately connected to national colonial histories (Bosma, 2012). Alternatively, it has been used to point towards the impact of Western colonial ideologies on race and ethnic relations and the formation of global anti-colonial and anti-imperial solidarities (Schueller, 2009). My account of postcolonial citizenship builds on scholarship that aspires to bring postcolonial insights to bear on multiculturalism (e.g. Gunew, 1997; Gilroy, 2008; Mookherjee, 2010). As a set of ‘theories … practices and policies that seek to provide public recognition of and support for accommodation of non-dominant ethnocultural groups’ (Ivison, 2010: 2), multiculturalism has significant crossovers with the politics of recognition. The relationship between multiculturalism and postcolonialism, however, is an ‘uneasy one’ (Gunew, 1997: 22). Liberal variants of multiculturalism, in particular, are regarded with an inordinate amount of suspicion by many postcolonial scholars, who are wary of their potential to essentialise cultural differences and their universalisation of liberal values. Postcolonial critiques have made a powerful injunction on liberal multiculturalists to take seriously the significance of colonial histories in shaping ideas of cultural difference, particularly those embedded within an imaginative divide between ‘West’ and ‘Rest’, and eschew essentialist conceptions of cultural identities in favour of a more relational understanding of culture as hybrid, heterogeneous and fluid. Nonetheless, multiculturalist and postcolonial projects have similar thematic concerns – not least of which are the importance of acknowledging difference and the injustice of enforcing commonality – that make their relationship not one of direct opposition, but rather of productive, if still underdeveloped (Mookherjee, 2010: 198), interface. It is thus critical not to see postcolonial critiques as demanding the outright dismissal of liberal multiculturalism. To the contrary, as Duncan Ivison (2002: 30) suggests, ‘[t]he simultaneous invocation of the inadequacy and yet the indispensability of liberal values and concepts such as justice, equality and freedom seem to lie at the heart of the postcolonial project’. In terms of multicultural struggles for recognition, I suggest that a postcolonial perspective is important because its insistence on seeing difference as produced by, and not simply situated within, relations of power opens up richer and more dynamic interpretations of recognition politics (see Chapter 3). Throwing a postcolonial cast over multicultural politics of recognition serves as a pertinent reminder that ‘difference’ is not a neutral or innocent category, but rather embroiled in hierarchy and conflict. It also allows us to engage certain issues that are typically side-lined in conventional multicultural scholarship, such as historical injustice and the position of Indigenous peoples in settler states, and bring a global perspective to bear on local struggles. For me, however, the main value of approaching the connections between recognition politics and the rearticulation of national community through the lens

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of postcolonial citizenship is that postcolonial theory, I believe, is particularly well equipped to engage the social justice impetus and critical potential that underlies such struggles. Postcolonial theory is not just ‘a distinct set of reading practices’ that illuminate how European colonialism has conditioned the present historical moment (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 12), crafting certain limits and engendering distinctive possibilities. It is also, as Robert Young (2012: 20) asserts, driven by a ‘wide-ranging political project – to reconstruct Western knowledge formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below’. This political project, as the quote from Ivison above also indicates, thus has a far more complicated relationship with Western modernity than one of simple rejection. Edward Said (1994: 216) calls this the ‘voyage in’, where postcolonial intellectuals make a ‘conscious effort to enter the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalised or suppressed or forgotten histories’. As I see it, the unique complexities and difficulties posed by this ‘voyage in’ are best engaged through the relationship between the universal and the particular. A central element of the postcolonial critique is the particular conception of universality legislated by European colonialism, which creates ‘a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant culture [the West] are held to be true for all humanity’ (Ashcroft et al., 2007: 216). Postcolonial scholars have done much to expose the ways in which notions of universality are predicated on the exclusion and marginalisation of a variety of Others, most stridently colonised peoples, and are used to mask assimilatory, violent and imperialist aims. But in acknowledging that colonialism produced a world that cannot be unmade, so to speak, postcolonial scholars do not dismiss the importance of universal categories in the pursuit of social justice. Instead, they seek to reveal their partialities as a way to hold them accountable to themselves and simultaneously forge spaces for diversity and difference (see Chapter 4). A crucial component of this project has been the attempt to dismantle the presumption that the West is the centre of the world while the non-West merely lies at its margins, what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) famously called ‘provincialising Europe’. I suggest that we can see a similar dynamic in multicultural politics for recognition, just writ somewhat smaller. In rearticulating the nation from the perspective of its presumed particulars, struggles for recognition work to dislodge the centrality of the ‘imagined national’, which, in Western contexts, is all too often equated with whiteness. They thus hold the presumed universality of hegemonic versions of national culture to account for their partialities and exclusions and, in doing so, aim to create spaces for difference and diversity. And, importantly, they operate with the intuition that there is always a hierarchical relationship between difference and the norm, and that the genuine recognition of difference demands unsettling what we imagine to be the norm.

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In foregrounding national community, my vision of postcolonial citizenship would seem to be at odds with certain strands of postcolonial theorising. Nation and nationalism occupy a particularly ambivalent position in postcolonial theory, and a number of scholars are wont to regard any appeals to nation as, at best, problematic and, at worst, blocking of the type of enlarged thinking that postcolonial justice demands. Throughout this book, I maintain that postcolonial theory would be well served to take seriously the persistence of nationalism in organising conceptions of identity, culture and belonging. It would also be well served to engage the political possibilities and limits this engenders for minority groups in the West. That increasing migration and politicisation of cultural diversity means that ‘we can no longer hold comfortably onto the notion of a closed national culture, complete within and for itself ’ (Smith, 2004: 245) is widely acknowledged by postcolonial scholars. However, the political dimensions of this for thinking about minority struggles for the recognition of difference remain broadly underanalysed. The postcolonial approach to culture as fluid, heterogeneous, impure and profoundly shaped by power is an incredibly useful resource for comprehending minority claims for recognition; providing, I argue, that this approach does not stop at the ‘borders’ of the nation. Likewise, postcolonial theory’s complication of the line between the universal and the particular is critically important to grasping the dynamics of contemporary recognition struggles; again, so long as we are willing to blur national centre and margin. As a frame of analysis, postcolonial citizenship builds on, but does not supplant, multicultural citizenship. Multicultural citizenship seeks to integrate a diversity of cultural practices and expressions of identity into the civil, political and social rights of traditional citizenship, but it too often leaves the nation untouched, subscribing to a vision of ‘packaged’ cultural communities and presuming the mainstream is a fixed cultural core. In contrast, postcolonial citizenship points to the ways in which struggles for recognition are discursively entangled with the nation as a means to engage how national community is a site of contesting claims and political struggle. Furthermore, while postcolonial citizenship recognises the significance of national imaginaries, it does not limit itself to the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. One of the important features of postcolonial theory in general is its capacity to situate ostensibly local struggles within a view of global inequalities, solidarities and alliances, as well as wider geo-political, regional and civilizational imaginaries. Accordingly, thinking through the lens of postcolonial citizenship affords an enlarged perspective on nation. It surveys the ways in which local national formations and regimes of misrecognition are produced and patterned by global relations, entanglements and interconnections related to European colonialism, especially those related to the imaginative geographies of ‘West’ and ‘non-West’. Most crucially, postcolonial citizenship engages how contemporary cultural diversity produces new ways of living together and new forms of belonging,

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as opposed to simply forging spaces of separation. As Said (1994: xxvi) writes: narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation, the stories of people who had been excluded from the main group but who were now fighting for a place in it. And if the old and habitual ideas of the main group were not flexible or generous enough to admit new groups, then these ideas need changing, a far better thing to do than reject the emerging groups. In the present era, where the polarisation of politics threatens to splinter communities into ever smaller interest groups, the profundity of this observation cannot be understated. Exploring how multicultural politics of recognition work to challenge, subvert and rearticulate dominant conceptions of national identity, culture and belonging offers us two important reminders. First, it would be a mistake to presume that multicultural politics are only in the service of the particular. Second, it would be equally remiss to see integration as only in the service of the hegemonic universal. Rather, it is far better to foreground the politics of difference as an integral part of the complex, messy and often contentious business of living together as a ‘we’ in the age of diversity.

From Australia … beyond? This book develops these arguments with reference to the Australian context, offering two case studies of struggles for recognition mounted by Australia’s Muslim and Aboriginal minorities (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively). Both of these groups are similarly, albeit differentially, positioned at the limits of the imagined Australian nation. By reading these struggles alongside each other, I do not intend to imply that they are equivalent, or even commensurate. As a religious minority immigrant group and an Indigenous people, respectively, Muslim and Aboriginal Australians have very different structural, political and affective relationships to both nation and state. In Will Kymlicka’s (2002: 29–30) distinction, while immigrants have ‘historically accepted the expectation that they will integrate into mainstream culture’, Indigenous peoples rally against their forceful inclusion into a settler polity and oftentimes seek to (re)establish their own nations. In framing Muslim and Aboriginal struggles through the rubric of multicultural politics of recognition, I also do not intend to suggest that liberal multiculturalism can account for all of their particular aims, demands and aspirations. Australia has had an official policy of multiculturalism since 1973, which has been relatively successful in making cultural diversity an accepted feature of the Australian social landscape. Nevertheless, Australian multiculturalism has been widely critiqued for its general inability to reckon with more critical expressions of cultural difference, and its particular oversight when it comes to the specific claims, needs

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and concerns of Indigenous peoples. To deem Muslim and Aboriginal struggles for recognition ‘multicultural’, then, is not to sublimate them within the framework of liberal multiculturalism but should be seen more as a descriptive shorthand than anything else. Keeping these important distinctions in mind, postcolonial citizenship may nonetheless provide a productive framework to think of such struggles alongside but not of each other. Indeed, such an approach has important implications in the Australian context, insofar as the ethno-focus of Australian multiculturalism has legislated a split between ethnic minorities and Aboriginal peoples, wherein an Indigenous presence is largely excised from the contemporary contours of socio-cultural diversity and the relevance of colonialism is erased from multicultural politics. Examining Muslim and Aboriginal struggles for recognition through the prism of nation enables us to see clearly the ways in which ideas of Australian national identity and culture are integral to their specific experiences of misrecognition. It also allows us to see just how often discourses of nation and appeals to the national ‘we’ feed into their particular claims. While the meanings Muslims and Aboriginals attach to recognition diverge quite markedly, I show that both are informed to a significant extent by the challenge they pose to the hegemonic centrality of the Anglo-Australian as the imagined national. In demanding recognition, both groups articulate alternative visions of national community that better acknowledge their particular identities, cultures, histories and aspirations. Australia is in many ways a germane location from which to develop my vision of postcolonial citizenship. Certainly, there are a number of specificities that contextually make it more amenable to the particular interpretation of recognition politics I offer in this book. As a British settler colony, questions of nation are unavoidably post-colonial7 in Australia and are intimately intertwined with the country’s settler colonial foundations. Likewise, Australian ideologies of multiculturalism are profoundly connected to conceptions of national identity, to the extent that multiculturalism can be considered a nation-building policy (Stratton and Ang, 1994). This has important implications for understandings of cultural difference and their position in the national imaginary, even as the country’s colonial history continues to pattern the Anglo-Australian as the hegemonic national subject (see Chapter 2). At the same time, it is the case that I develop my account of postcolonial citizenship with somewhat of a comparative eye. Specifically, I hope that its usefulness might extend into non-Australian locations, inviting reflection on how the politicisation of cultural difference through struggles for recognition might be entangled with the reconstitution of the national. Reflecting on how minorities invoke nation in their struggles for recognition encourages us to think beyond multiculturalism as a matter of policy or top-down models of multicultural nation building. Postcolonial citizenship thus affords an analytical framework with which to comprehend how these processes take place even in the absence of formal policies of multiculturalism. Furthermore, it

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underscores the significance of a postcolonial perspective, with its concordant emphasis on how colonial histories come to shape intercultural relations, for thinking about contemporary expressions of cultural diversity and national identity in Western contexts. Every context is, of course, unique, as is every conception of nationhood. Each nation has its own myths of origin and distinctiveness (what makes ‘the people’ a people), its own histories and imaginaries of Self and Other and marks its limits in unique ways. However, in exploring how recognition struggles can work to revise conceptions of national belonging, we might not only potentially open up alternate ways of understanding the social contours of contemporary ethnic, racial and cultural diversity. We may also perhaps develop unconventional insights into the vicissitudes and continuities of the imaginative category we call ‘the West’. At the very least, I hope that my account of postcolonial citizenship serves as a reminder that, in the politics of diversity and citizenship, the assertion of commonality can be as radical, critical and transformational as the assertion of difference.

Plan of the book Approaching national community as open to rearticulation by cultural minorities challenges dominant understandings of nations as neatly bounded, relatively homogenous ethno-cultural units. Chapter 2 draws on Craig Calhoun’s approach to nation as produced within the discursive formation of nationalism in order to contest these presumptions. Calhoun sees nationalism as simultaneously a way of categorising human populations and a normative claim, which shapes forms of diversity and is intimately implicated in democracy. For postcolonial theory, I suggest that Calhoun’s account of nation affords a useful bridge between ‘textualists’ who regard nationalism as enforcing homogeneity on heterogeneity and ‘materialists’ who concede its value for anti-colonial and anti-imperial politics. Specifically, in underscoring nations as not inheritances but rather creations forged through political struggles, Calhoun allows us to turn postcolonial insights regarding culture to the domain of the national and comprehend how contemporary anti-colonial politics may take place within the bounds of the nation-state. The chapter also explores historical and contemporary manifestations of the idea of nation in Australia. This discussion not only contextualises the book, but helps to flag the partialities of Eurocentric understandings of nation and demonstrate how national identity and culture are not necessarily counter to the cause of cultural diversity. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the recognition-theoretic paradigm from a postcolonial perspective, focusing on the ‘classical’ theories of recognition developed by Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser. Postcolonial theorists have leveraged some of the heftiest charges against recognition politics, accusing it of reinforcing, rather than undermining, dominant relations of power that undercut the freedom and equality of minority groups. This

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postcolonial critique serves as an important reminder of the ways in which structures of domination shape understandings of difference and warns against the potential of recognition to encourage minorities to identify with the social conditions that oppress them. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the insights of recognition theory can be consonant with postcolonial aims, so long as we are willing to further reflect on the relationship between misrecognition as a source of conflict and recognition as a remedy. To this end, the chapter offers a close reading of the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon’s reflections on recognition. Fanon, too, is deeply suspicious of the possibilities of reciprocal recognition in colonial contexts. However, his perceptive insights into the entanglements of misrecognition and recognition highlight the ways in which the recognition of difference is inescapably bound up with the rearticulation of political identity. Fanon alerts us to a dialectical relationship between the universal and the particular in recognition struggles, and Chapter 4 articulates this relationship in more specific terms. Universality has come to accrue something of a bad name in much postcolonial theorising, coming to stand for exclusion, assimilation and violence. I draw on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘contingent universality’ in order to highlight that there is no way of drawing a firm line between the universal and the particular. Butler’s reflections are important because they show how what is considered universal at any given time is always subject to revision and contestation. They also demonstrate how claims ostensibly concerned with the particular may in fact be ‘competing universalisms’ – an insight I ground with an exploration of postcolonial feminist demands for recognition within feminism. The chapter ends with a consideration of how nation may function as a contingent universal in multicultural struggles for recognition. Building on Ghassan Hage’s idea of the nation as a field of power, I suggest that struggles for the affirmation of difference can similarly be seen as challenging the false universality of hegemonic visions of nation, in turn positing their own competing conceptions of the national ‘we’. Chapters 5 and 6 offer case studies of the ways in which nation discursively figures in Muslim and Aboriginal struggles for recognition in Australia and thus constitute the empirical core of the book. As is the case across much of the Western world, and especially since the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Muslims in Australia have been the objects of widespread social vilification and prejudice, with Muslim difference commonly presented as dangerous and outside the bounds of acceptable multicultural diversity. Chapter 5 examines how the transnational dimensions of Muslim misrecognition – that is, its connections to global political events and embedding in colonial imaginaries related to the West/Islam divide – interlace with Australian national imaginaries. Reading through two recent Muslim Australian popular culture productions, the television programme Salam Café and the comedy show Fear of a Brown Planet, this chapter argues that confronting the idea that Muslims are ‘un-Australian’ is part and parcel of their struggles for the

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recognition of difference. Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet illustrate this in decidedly different ways; the former can be thought of as inherently liberal while the latter is deeply combative. At the same time, I suggest that both cultural interventions do similar work insofar as they seek to dislodge the partialities of a white Anglo conception of Australia and its concomitant exclusion of Muslims as well as other marginalised and minority communities. Chapter 6 focuses on the ways in which Aboriginal recognition has been attached to the project of national reconciliation since the early 1990s. The idea of the Australian nation is indeed problematic for Aboriginal peoples, and postcolonial scholars have widely critiqued the emphasis on post-colonial nation building in the Australian reconciliation process, variously charging it with being assimilative of Aboriginal alterity and more concerned with settler desires than Indigenous needs. This chapter argues that appeals to nation should not be seen as innately incompatible with Aboriginal cultural difference, but rather an indispensable and politically productive vocabulary for Indigenous claims. Ideas of national identity and culture constitute a critical dimension of Aboriginal experiences of misrecognition. Moreover, unsettling national terms of association is particularly pertinent for Aboriginal claims, because they require settler Australians to acknowledge historical wrongs and the validity of Indigenous perspectives. I demonstrate that nation can be as much a political category as an ideological one with reference to 2008 federal government apology to the Stolen Generations. Even as an increasing number of critical voices have argued that full Indigenous justice requires recognition of sovereignty, I suggest that appeals to a national ‘we’ continue to have political and rhetorical significance. Finally, Chapter 7 offers reflections on my understanding of postcolonial citizenship as a means to further develop the concept. It does this, firstly, by engaging postcolonial citizenship alongside conceptions of multicultural citizenship. Multicultural citizenship remains a critical, if not indispensable, framework for thinking about contemporary cultural diversity. However, it has come under significant critique for purportedly placing too much emphasis on difference at the expense of commonality. Postcolonial citizenship, imagined in terms of how cultural minorities actualise multicultural realities, allows a more purposeful reading of how difference-related politics is inseparable from ideas of political community. Moreover, in foregrounding national identity and culture as sites of debate, disagreement and contestation, it enables us to approach nation from a bottom-up perspective rather than – as many multiculturalists are wont to do – a top-down one. Such a perspective underscores the interpretative value of postcolonial citizenship in countries without official policies of multiculturalism. Secondly, the chapter considers postcolonial citizenship in relation to contemporary postcolonial theory and politics. Postcolonial citizenship is not a consensual or cumulative process, and the current surge in populist nationalisms is arguably one response to the increased political and cultural visibility of minorities and its

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concordant unsettling of hegemonic national imaginaries. Nonetheless, paying attention to the ways in which ideas of nation change with multicultural politics allows postcolonial theorists to develop more nuanced and less reductive understandings of these developments. Furthermore, it may help to better engage shifts in what constitutes ‘the West’ as an imaginary as well as the emerging fissure between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that has come to define contemporary Western politics.

Notes 1 I will discuss the Cronulla Riots in more detail in Chapter 5. 2 Interestingly, these bands are well known to sit on the left side of the political spectrum. 3 See: Welcome to Australia (2015) ‘#SayWelcome, Walk Together 2015 (episode 1)’: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJZX9XSTN9E&feature=youtu.be. 4 See: www.peterdrewarts.com/. 5 Home can, of course, also stand for feelings of fear, violence and alienation, but the point is that home is an imaginative geography that is productive of certain identities and relationships (see Dowling and Blunt, 2006). 6 As a relation of domination in which one people is politically, economically and culturally subjugated to another, colonialism is, of course, neither new nor exclusively European. However, the success of the European colonial projects exceeded by far that of other colonial projects. Indeed, it is estimated that by 1914 Europe controlled an historically unparalleled 85 per cent of the earth’s total surface (Said, 1994: 8). The focus on Western colonialism and imperialism is arguably also connected to the entanglements of postcolonial theory with the historical project of Third Worldism. Widely considered to have been inaugurated at the Bandung conference in 1955, Third Worldism’s connections to the socialist bloc meant that Soviet colonialism in Eastern Europe was largely bypassed by a focus on Western imperialism (Chakrabarty, 2005). 7 In this book, I use ‘postcolonial’ when talking about matters pertaining to postcolonial theory but ‘post-colonial’ as a social descriptor. I intend for the hyphen to point towards the continuities and discontinuities of colonial legacies in the contemporary era.

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Schueller, M.J. (2009) Locating race: Global sites of post-colonial citizenship. New York: SUNY Press. Shohat, E. (1992) ‘Notes on the “post-colonial”’. Social Text 31/32: 99–113. Smith, A. (2004) ‘Migrancy, hybridity and postcolonial literary studies’. In N. Lazarus (ed.) The Cambridge companion to postcolonial literary studies, (pp. 241–261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, G.C. (2003) Death of a discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Stratton, J. and Ang, I. (1994) ‘Multicultural imagined communities: Cultural difference and national identity in the USA and Australia’. Continuum 8(2): 124–158. Taylor, C. (1994) ‘The politics of recognition’. In A. Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition, (pp. 25–73). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thompson, S. and Yar, M. (eds) (2011) The politics of misrecognition. Farnham: Ashgate. Uberoi, V. (2008) ‘Do policies of multiculturalism change national identities?’ Political Quarterly 79(3): 404–417. Young, R.J.C. (1990) White mythologies: Writing history and the West. London: Routledge. Young, R.J.C. (2012) ‘Postcolonial remains’. New Literary History 43: 19–42. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011) The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage.

2

Conceptualising nation Discourse, democracy and postcolonial debate

Does the critic who criticises nationalism for essentialism himself essentialise, romanticise, or reify a model of national community? (Chrisman, 2004: 198)

It is fair to say that nation has come to accrue something of a bad name in postcolonial theory. Emerging as a field of inquiry in the 1980s, the heavy imbrications of postcolonialism with poststructuralism saw many postcolonial theorists similarly renounce nation as implicated in ‘a Western, imperialist, logocentric reason’ (Jusdanis, 2001: 4). The trope of nation is widely regarded as essentialist in character, seeking unity at the expense of diversity and disproportionately concerned with mythologies of primordial origins and narratives of exceptionality. It is seen as running up against, and seeking to contain, the complexities and messiness of processes of cultural identification, where the boundaries between Self and Other are never as clear as they seem and hybridity is the order of the day. The atrocious ends to which the doctrine of nationalism was put throughout the twentieth century would seem to vindicate this claim. In the pursuit of a stable cohesive national identity, a whole host of nationalist projects betrayed their inability to account for difference, whether through policies of forced assimilation like in Australia, rape and sexual violence as was the case in the Balkans or bureaucratised genocide as exemplified by Nazi Germany. For Edward Said (1988: 58), nationalism is a ‘heightened process of identity enforcement’ that ‘is almost always implicated directly or indirectly’ in the negation of other identities, and which invariably pushes the Other further towards the margins as the centre consolidates its power. Yet, the nation has a Janus face, as Tom Nairn (1997) so famously declared. As a categorical identity rooted in an imagined ethnic or cultural commonality, nation may indeed be used to justify the exclusion of outsiders, enforce sameness and legitimate violence as well as ideologies of superiority. But it is also a powerful source of identity, belonging and social solidarity. In locating individuals as part of a wider collectivity, nation carries the promise of immortality (Anderson, 1991), arouses a sense of working together for the common good and allows people to participate in political affairs and a public culture (Calhoun, 2007). As Benedict Anderson (1991: 141–2) writes:

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in an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love’. Nationalism, too, is not only used to oppress and eradicate. Grounded in the vision of popular political participation, nationalism has been a key weapon in the fight against universalist doctrines that would supress difference and thus essential to inumerous struggles for freedom, equality, justice and self-determination. And from a postcolonial perspective, it cannot be neglected that ideas of nation and ideologies of nationalism were critical in bringing European colonialism to its formal end, having sparked the wave of decolonisation that swept the globe from 1945 onwards. Engaging nation’s dual character is a demanding task, not least because the term itself ‘has a long history and carries a heavy ideological baggage’ (Parekh, 1995: 255). This chapter is concerned with articulating an account of nation that is reflective of its progressive possibilities while not discounting its ever present potential for abuse, manipulation and violence. If, as I want to argue in this book, minority struggles for the recognition of difference are not incompatible with but constitutive of imagined national community, it is crucial to confront widely held presumptions that nation is invariably counter to difference and internal diversity. As an ‘imagined political community’ (Anderson, 1991), nations are very often thought in ethno-cultural terms as ethnic identities writ large, and thus the fixed ‘property’ of a particular people. Here, I aim to underscore nation as a discursive formation; that is, a way of mediating and producing social reality that is constitutive of subjectivities and power relations, but which is discontinuous, characterised by diverse meanings and thus always vulnerable to rearticulation (see Foucault, 1981). To this end, I draw on sociologist Craig Calhoun’s work on nation and nationalism. For Calhoun (2007), the idea of nation may be put to nefarious ends but ‘is not a moral mistake’ (p. 1). Taking seriously the persistence of nation as the predominant form of political community thus compels us not only to recognise the important work it already does in organising forms of identity, culture and belonging in the contemporary era, but to also reflect on its significance in, and potential for, democratic politics. As Calhoun maintains, ‘nations organise the primary arena for democratic political participation’ (p. 148) and it is through this that their dynamism and openness to creative rearticulation becomes most evident. Of course, Calhoun is not the only scholar to consider nation in these terms (see, for example, Brennan, 1990; Nairn, 1997; Jusdanis, 2001; Brubaker, 2004). For our purposes, however, I find him particularly helpful because he explicitly reflects on the imbrications of nationalism, democracy and diversity. In particular, I suggest that his insistence on seeing nations as both the ‘products of politics’ and ‘objects of new political projects’ (p. 148) is valuable in

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addressing many of the misgivings of postcolonial theorists towards the national. It also offers a pertinent insight that postcolonial theorists would be well served by in their analyses of cultural minorities in Western contexts. Not all postcolonial theorists are anti-nation, and postcolonial studies as a field is broadly split between poststructuralist and materialist scholars. Whereas poststructuralist scholars are wont to dismiss nation as enforcing homogeneity on heterogeneity, materialist scholars are generally more amenable to the emancipatory potential of anti-colonial and anti-imperial nationalisms. One of the implications of the poststructuralist rejection of nation is that nations are static cultural and political entities, which is hardly in keeping with the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity. Similarly, one of the implications of the qualified support that materialists offer nationalism is that Western nationalisms are invariably imperialist, which blocks an understanding of how expressions of nationalism in the West may have changed with the presence of increasing cultural diversity. Engaging nations as cultural creations forged through democratic political struggles affords a bridge of sorts between these two takes. The last section of the chapter explores the idea of nation as it has developed in Australia. This discussion serves two purposes. Firstly, as a former British settler colony which adopted an official policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s, Australian trajectories of nation building highlight the creative dimensions of national culture and the capacity for nationalism to acknowledge internal cultural diversity. Secondly, and more pertinently, it allows me to situate the arguments developed throughout the book. As much as the ‘unity-in diversity’ formulation of Australian multiculturalism has been quite successful in shaping national self-understandings, Australia’s colonial history has nevertheless been productive of a context in which dominant national imaginaries situate the white Anglo-Celt as the prototypical national. This shapes understandings of cultural diversity and channels expressions of cultural difference in certain ways, which have significant implications for immigrant and Indigenous communities. At the same time, it creates a context in which the idea of who is a ‘real’ Australian plays an important role in multicultural struggles for recognition. It is the potential of these struggles to dislodge the imagined centrality of the Anglo Australian that constitutes the crux of this book.

Nations and nationalism Nation is a notoriously slippery concept. Not only is it so ubiquitous in our everyday life that we all too often interchange it with other concepts like state, society and ethnicity, but there is no one definition of what a nation is per se. As ‘imagined political communities’ (Anderson, 1991), nations are a distinctive form of social organisation that sit above the local level of kinship groups, cities or villages (Calhoun, 2007: 48) but below the level of the global and universal categories like humanity. While ideas of nationhood very often

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invoke imagery of blood, kinship and familial relations, nations are categorical insofar as they denote commonality at a higher level such as language, a shared culture or common descent. It is important, however, to underscore that nations are above all else political structures. 1 That is to say, they are units of political organisation which are grounded in a sense of cultural distinctiveness. If there is no objective definition of what constitutes a nation,2 there is nevertheless a set of rhetorical features that are common to national collectivities. Calhoun (1997: 4–5) suggests that the ‘rhetoric of nation’ includes at least some of the following ten features:          

boundaries of territory and/or population; indivisibility; sovereignty, or the aspiration to sovereignty; a conception of popular will; popular participation in collective affairs; direct, horizontal membership; common culture (language, beliefs, values, etc.); a sense of temporal depth (moving from the past into the future); common descent or racial characteristics; special historical or sacred relations to a given territory.

These features help us to distinguish nation from other concepts with which it is regularly confused, even as they often blur into each other in practice. The construction of commonality entailed in the concept of nation, for instance, is far richer than the more amorphous notion of society. While we often presume a direct correspondence between nation and society (what Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) call ‘methodological nationalism’), societies may indeed house multiple and/or overlapping nations. Similarly, the nation is distinct from the state as a political unit concerned with the bureaucratic administration of a polity (such as finance, law and ruling institutions), although the nation-state formulation means that states are often considered their ‘natural’ expression. And as much as ethnicity and nationhood are overlaid in many instances, an ethnic group is not by definition a nation but may become one if organised around the political principle of territorial self-determination. Whereas the idea of a nation as a distinctive people is relatively common throughout history – the ancient Israelites, for example, were often spoken about as a ‘nation’ – this particular understanding of nation as a politicalcultural unit is a decidedly recent invention. For this reason, Calhoun (1997: 99) suggests, ‘it is crucial … to grasp … that nations only exist within the contents of nationalism’. Nationalism, too, is particularly difficult to define. Broadly speaking, we can understand nationalism as a political ideology that the world is divided up into nations, nations are the sole legitimate source of political power and all nations should be free and secure (Smith, 1994: 379). In seeing ‘the people’, as opposed to God, dynasties or monarchies, as the

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source of legitimate rule, nationalism is an essentially modern ideology (Calhoun, 2007: 3). For classical scholars, nationalism can only be understood as intimately connected to the far-reaching social, economic, technological and political transformations of modernity, not least of which are the development of capitalist economies and the establishment of an international political system where sovereignty is located in states. Ernest Gellner’s (1983) highly influential Nations and Nationalism, for instance, argued that industrialisation and the rise of capitalism were key to the emergence of nations. In particular, the need for a homogenised, mobile and easily retrainable workforce translated to the development of formal education systems designed to produce mass literacy in a common language and a standardised set of skills, as well as the imposition of a common ‘high culture’ to promote a sense of unity and a willingness to work hard for the ‘common good’. For Benedict Anderson (1991), it is print capitalism that made possible the development of a nationalist consciousness, with the printing of texts in the vernacular (as opposed to sacred languages like Latin only accessible to a learned few) dually facilitating the production of new mass markets and unified language fields of communication and exchange. With printed languages sitting somewhere between high languages and local vernaculars, they not only solidified certain dialects as ‘national’ languages, but also facilitated the sense of simultaneity among certain populations so critical to the national imaginary. One of the key debates in classical scholarship is whether nations or nationalism came first. Some scholars like Gellner argue that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist’ (in Anderson, 1991: 6). Other scholars like Anthony D. Smith (1986) point to the ways in which ideas of nationhood drew on earlier cultural motifs, ideals and values as well as pre-existing ethnic identities. In seeing nationalism as simultaneously a way of categorising human populations and a normative claim (Calhoun, 2007: 39), we can understand nation and nationalism as mutually constitutive. As Calhoun (2007: 51) suggests, while we cannot fully dissociate nation from ethnicity, the meanings of the latter were profoundly transformed by nationalism; indeed, ethnic identities and solidarities are now often imagined as cutting across national space and state borders as opposed to being the foundation of national communities. This is something to which the French philologist Ernest Renan alluded in an 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris. Counter to efforts to locate an objective basis to nationhood in ethnicity, religion, language, geography or material interest, Renan (1990: 19) argued that nations are ‘large-scale solidarities’ defined by the pursuit of imagining a common past and willingness to share a future and thus grounded in the consent given by their members to live together. This project is of necessity a violent one and more often framed around forgetting than remembering. ‘No French citizen’, Renan declared, ‘knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of St Bartholomew’ (p. 11).

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At the same time, nation can only be understood as ‘a soul, a spiritual principle’ that is ‘the outcome of the profound complications of history’ (p. 18).3 Perhaps the most significant consequence of nationalism is the ways in which it turned the question of ethnicity towards the matter of a shared public culture. In order to integrate various ethnic and cultural groups into a single national population, nationalism compelled self-conscious projects of collective definition – we can see just how self-conscious these are in decisions over national symbols like flags, anthems and public holidays. The creation of a shared culture designating a ‘national way of life’ is essential to nationalist projects because it provides ‘cultural support for structures of social integration’ (Calhoun, 2007: 152). Gregory Jusdanis similarly underscores the importance of culture to nationalism in The Necessary Nation (2001). Jusdanis argues that ‘culture became political when it became national – that is, when people began to justify political rule on the basis of ethnic unity’ (p. 6). In politicising ethnicity and endowing it with ‘institutions and practices unique to itself’ (p. 12), nationalism fashioned a process of cultural invention in which ‘cultural values and practices are overwhelmingly deployed in the creation and maintenance of a nation-state to justify its existence and guarantee its rightful place in the transnational order’ (pp. 38–9). For Jusdanis, nationalism is thus ‘ultimately a cultural phenomenon’ (p. 10) because it draws its potency from the creation of a national culture and turns culture into a site of political struggle. Because it is ‘a way – or a set of interconnected ways – of articulating collective identity in multiple contexts and on different levels’, Calhoun (1997: 22) maintains that it is essential to ‘treat nationalism first as a discursive formation’. Engaging nationalism as a discourse highlights the productive role it plays in identity formation, the composition of political and cultural space and affective relations of belonging and solidarity, as well as the construction of political projects and particular modes of evaluation. This is important because it allows us to grasp the potency of nationalism as a frame of political imagination and mode of social organisation. Discourse is not simply limited to the realm of language, as Michel Foucault (1979: 124) reminds us, but rather is the medium ‘which produces reality … [and] domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (my emphasis). The ideology of nationalism is embedded in the structures and institutions of nation-states, including schools, bureaucracies, markets and the military, and ideas of nation shape everything from newspapers to tourism. The ways in which nationhood is ‘flagged’ in the daily lives of its citizenry and thus reproduced on the familiar – and barely registered – terrain of the everyday is what Michael Billig (1995) calls ‘banal nationalism’. Nationalism, Billig argues, should not be seen as the preserve of flag-waving nationalists but is better encapsulated in the flag hanging limply from the side of a public building. ‘The world of nations’ comes into being in ‘embodied habits of social life … which include those of thinking and using language’ (p. 8). As an ideology, then, nationalism is so woven into the fabric of everyday life that we are rarely aware of how crucial it is in shaping and mediating our experience of social reality.

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We do not just live in the space of nations, however. As a number of scholars associated with the ‘bottom-up’ study of nationalism have argued (e.g. Edensor, 2002; Brubaker, 2004), nation is a ‘cultural praxis in everyday life’ (Lofgren, 1989: 23). As such, people are active participants in its reproduction. In what is arguably the most comprehensive account in this field of scholarship, Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2008) make a distinction between four modalities of everyday nationalism that shed ‘light on the ways in which ordinary people are active participants in the quotidian production and reproduction of the nation’ (p. 538). The nation, they argue, is (re)produced by ‘making the people national’, and people become ‘national’ by:    

‘talking the nation’, which is the routine speech people use when talking about the nation as well as with it when they are called to do so; ‘choosing the nation’, which is the choices that people make such as reading a nationalist newspaper or sending their children to a minority-language school; ‘performing the nation’, such as participating in ritual performances like sporting events; and finally ‘consuming the nation’, which includes not just national products like food, but also media, school curricula and tourism.

Each of these modalities can occur both unreflexively and self-consciously; that is to say, sometimes nationhood functions as a backdrop for social interactions and our participation in it is entirely passive (or, indeed, missed altogether), and sometimes social actors bring it to the forefront. In contrast to nationalist ideologies that demand that people prioritise the nation, much of the time it is not salient in their everyday lives. However, as Fox and Miller-Idriss demonstrate, people do ‘enact, constitute, legitimate and sometimes undermine the idiom of nation’ (p. 554) in a multitude of banal and mundane ways. In this regard, bottom-up scholarship challenges the idea that people are uncritically swallowing of nationalist discourse and merely the passive dupes of manipulating elites (Herzfeld, 1997). Approaching nation as a discursive construct does not emphasise consensus. Rather, as Calhoun (1997: 98) maintains, ‘the idea of nation, nationality and the like are essentially contested because any particular definition of them will privilege some collectivities, interests and identities and damage the claims of others’. As social psychologists have demonstrated, any claim to a common identity legislates debate, controversy and disagreement: ‘because we expect fellow group members to have common views on their identity, we try out our views on each other all the time, in a deliberately argumentative way, striving for, but never quite reaching, “consensualisation”’ (Mandler, 2006: 275). Johann Arnanson (2001: 80–1) elucidates this in slightly different terms: To see national identity as grounded in imaginary significations is to stress the variety of ways to form a nation, the openness of every pattern

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of nationhood to a plurality of interpretations, and the availability of surplus meaning to sustain interpretive innovations. This leads us to Calhoun’s second point of nationalism as a normative claim. Classical scholarship has typically been wary of nationalist ideologies, particularly insofar as they are used to place certain demands on people’s loyalties, require that they prioritise their national identity above all others and hold special obligations to their fellow nationals (Smith, 1994: 139). In focusing on how nations developed in conjunction with various ideological projects, namely those connected to the expansion of capitalism, imperialism and the need to secure legitimacy for states, such scholarship has very often been associated with a rather negative view of nation (Anderson, who is sympathetic to the ideals embedded in nationhood, is an exception here). Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s (1983) edited collection The Invention of Tradition, for example, alternatively explored how the rituals and symbols of nationhood are ‘invented’ as a means to produce a sense of social cohesion as well as socialisation into certain ‘beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour’ (p. 9), and thereby establish or legitimise institutions and relations of authority. It is thus the case that nationalism is widely regarded as a top-down ideological means of propping up elite dominance. Yet, to the extent that we acknowledge nation as a discourse characterised by dissensus, competing views and the capacity for innovation, we are better positioned to grasp its potential for democratic politics. Eric Hobsbawm (1990: 10) asserts that nations are ‘dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people’. And for ‘ordinary people’,4 the imaginary of nation is an important means whereby they can participate and be collectively represented in the political sphere. As Calhoun (2007: 149) states, ‘nationalism is crucial to democratic subjectivity, providing a basis for the capacity to speak as “we the people”’. The particular construction of collectivity embedded in nation – in particular, the notions of horizontal membership and equal rights to participation – is absolutely essential to the idea of democracy, which stresses egalitarianism, equality, freedom and popular rule, and nationalism itself was historically enmeshed with the gradual movement towards democracy (Jusdanis, 2001: 140). In fashioning a national culture, nationalism furthermore fosters a sense of social solidarity that ‘binds people together across social classes, bridges regional, ethnic and sometimes religious differences’ (Calhoun, 2007: 154–5). It additionally helps to ‘mobilise commitments to public institutions, projects and debates’ and foster a sense of mutual responsibility and concern among citizens (Calhoun, 2007: 148). Of course, it is prudent to recall that nation building is a hegemonic project, which entails the (often forced) integration of different populations into certain social modalities and forms of consciousness. The rhetoric of the nation as ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson, 1991: 6–7) not only

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masks the exclusions that take place under its mandate, but also suppresses certain values, traditions, practices and versions of the past. At the same time, it is critical not to lose sight of the deep imbrications of nationalism with democracy – something that understanding nation as a discursive construct arguably helps to bring to light. As much as the idea of nation has been put to decisively anti-democratic ends, it always produces contestation and differing interpretations and therefore cannot be reduced to an ideological mechanism of enforced unity. For Calhoun, it is precisely the extent to which nationalism is able to account for debates and disagreements over the meaning of nation, as well as diverse identities and competing conceptualisations, that is the test of a democratic culture. ‘Without diversity,’ he writes, ‘democracy is hardly distinct from a dictatorship of the masses. If democracy is to flourish, nationalism must not become the enemy of difference’ (2007: 99). Like all social and cultural formations, nations are dynamic, which means that their expressions shift over time but they are open to creative rearticulation and sometimes transformation; as such, they are always in the process of becoming. And as a unique politicisation of culture implicated in democratic ideals, ‘national cultures … contain the potential for selftranscendence’ because they ‘incorporate norms, values and understandings that point towards better futures’ (Calhoun, 2007: 158). Highlighting nation as a political achievement as opposed to a pre-political given allows us to see how disagreements and disputes over their contents, meanings and projects are an essential component of contemporary democratic politics. It also underscores the capacity of nationalism as a discursive formation to account for difference and diversity as well as a means to achieve solidarity across the lines of difference. It is of little analytical or political value to overestimate these capacities and critical potentials – as Smith (2008: 566) reminds us, questions of national identity can very often be a matter of life or death in many parts of the world. But it is equally of little use to underestimate them, given the potent ways in which nationalism shapes contemporary social reality and the fragile hold we have over democracy as a political ideal.

Nationalism and postcolonial theory Approaching nation as a political creation and not a cultural inheritance (Calhoun, 2007: 36) does not mean that conceptions of national identity, culture and belonging are radically revisable. All nations have their own unique histories, myths, anxieties, collective self-understandings and ‘characteristic ways of thinking and living’ (Parekh, 1995: 257). These necessarily condition alternative articulations of national community and place certain constraints on how much representative weight they might be afforded. Innovative interpretations of national culture and identity are likewise historically conditioned by prevailing material, political and economic realities. The Australian national myth of a ‘fair go’, for instance, is quite incompatible

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with the American ideology of extreme individualism, even if the meanings it accrues and the forms of expression it takes shift along with social circumstances. At the same time, the power of nationalist ideology means that we often underestimate just how much ideas of nation change across time and space. As John Armstrong (1982: 77–8) suggests, all nations have ‘symbolic border guards’ that help to delineate their boundaries. These relate to the whole field of cultural practices, including things like language and religion, and would appear to have an enduring ability insofar as they are reproduced generation after generation. But it is precisely because certain practices seem to endure across time that we are not aware of how many ‘national’ cultural practices have not survived historical changes. Exploring how conceptions of nation accrue new or contradictory meanings not only allows us to foreground their social construction, highlighting how they are continuously (re) produced, contested and revised. It also allows us to undercut nationalist ideologies that aspire to sameness and which claim true representative status. Postcolonial theory is well poised to engage the ways in which ideas of national community shift across time while equally paying heed to the persistence of hegemonic imaginaries. To the extent that postcolonialism as a field of inquiry is concerned with domination and resistance, it is also fundamentally about the relationship between continuity and change. For me, the ‘post’ of postcolonial is thus best read as symbolising the fragmented temporality that shapes the key concerns of the field. On the one hand, the postdesignates a particular historical period after the formal end of European colonialism, but understands this as heralding a new era where the asymmetries and inequities of power relations related to colonialism have mutated, transformed and recalibrated, but not yet been extinguished. On the other hand, the post- is indicative of a political project, which involves imagining the conditions that would make a genuinely post-colonial world – that is, one not defined by Western hegemony – possible. What this means is that postcolonial scholars are committed to reading the traces and remains of colonial structures of domination and exploitation into contemporary discourses, ideologies, representations and relations – lest they are complicit in prematurely announcing colonialism’s end. But they must also pay close attention to past and present modalities of resistance against colonialism employed by colonised peoples and their allies, revisiting colonial encounters in order to locate spaces of agency and resistance that refuse the illusion of total domination colonialism itself sought to project (Bhabha, 1994; Parry, 1994). As such, tracing and uncovering the ways in which colonised and other marginalised groups rearticulate hegemonic cultural formations, staking claim on them and making them their own is essential to the commitment that a post-colonial world is one day possible.5 Despite this heightened sensitivity to the political significance of continuity and change, it is fair to say that postcolonial theory in general has rarely considered the nation in the terms I seek to develop in this book – that is, how cultural minorities in the West may be actively engaged in the process of

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rearticulating conceptions of national community. In part, this is due to the emphasis on big-N nationalisms at the expense of the little-n ones, even as the sociological realities produced by the discursive formation of nationalism afford important fodder for a whole variety of postcolonial analyses. More stridently, however, I see this to be a consequence of what is a relatively deep methodological split in postcolonial theory, which produces a context in which postcolonial theorists of different stripes seldom speak to each other beyond a context of mutual critique. One of the most notable features of postcolonialism is the heterogeneity of inquiries and methodologies encompassed by its purview. It is widely celebrated for its heralding of dissensus, ambivalence and instability over more traditional theoretical approaches that seek unified coherency (Brennan, 2013: 68). While postcolonialism is a field in which poststructuralists vie with Marxists, culturalists with materialists and textualists with realists, it is possible to discern two distinct strains of postcolonial theory as Benita Parry (2004: 66) suggests.6 The first is a poststructuralist, culturalist, textualist strain, where colonialism is primarily engaged as an ideological and discursive formation – that is, ‘an apparatus for constituting subject positions through the field of representation’ (Slemon, 1995: 46) – and the pursuit of heterogeneity is prized as an end in itself. The second is a Marxist, materialist, realist strain, which is more concerned with the political-economic aspects of colonialism as a historical and material formation and is committed to a socialist political project of redistribution. Recent shifts in postcolonial theory, such as its application to more empirically oriented fields like political science and international relations, have seen an increased focus on material politics and political struggles by postcolonial scholars (Brennan, 2013). Nevertheless, the former strain, which is typically represented by the so-called ‘Holy Trinity’ (Young, 1990) of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, remains hegemonic in postcolonial scholarship, particularly that concerned with issues of culture, identity and the representation of difference. This hegemonic dominance in part explains the circularity of much postcolonial scholarship where scholars are caught in the conundrum of having to respond to similar issues and rehash self-referential debates, as well as the continued positioning of materialist scholarship as merely ‘critique’ and therefore secondary to the field. It is thus important to treat the divergences of culturalist and materialist approaches as productive sites of conversation that bilaterally shape the contours of postcolonial inquiry and critique. The nation is one of these key sites of divergence. As Laura Chrisman (2004: 183) suggests, whereas materialists typically treat nation as a sociopolitical formation, poststructuralists are likely to approach it from a cultural or epistemological perspective. The former – represented by scholars like Parry, Chrisman, Timothy Brennan and Neil Lazarus – are in general more sympathetic to the ideals of nationhood and principles of nationalism. This is in large part due to their greater affiliation with the work of early anti-colonial

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theorists actively involved in mid-twentieth-century struggles for decolonisation. Nationalism afforded an important political principle for such theorists: the idea that all peoples have the right to self-determination in the form of a sovereign state, in particular, was key to articulating what was so unjust about colonial occupation and imperialism more broadly (Jusdanis, 2001). Many such struggles did not always follow traditional nationalist lines, with resistance sometimes mounted through non-state imaginaries like négritude and pan-Arabism. Nevertheless, nationalism’s equation of cultural distinctiveness with political sovereignty played a formative role in anti-colonial scholarship, albeit not an uncritical one. In his classic The Wretched of the Earth, for instance, Frantz Fanon (1965) mounted an incisive critique of the pitfalls of nationalist consciousness – in particular, the ease with which it can be hijacked by elite bourgeois interests and its potential to slip into racism – yet continued to vest the nationalist notion of the popular will of the people as indispensable for the actualisation of democratic decolonisation (pp. 159–65). Amil Cabral (1974) was similarly wary of the potential for nationalism to entrench the social and political privileges of the ruling class. However, he also saw ‘national culture’ as a crucial means to unify the people against colonialism, help them to identify with ‘the fundamental problems and aspirations of the society’ and accept ‘the possibility of change in the direction of progress’, as well as to keep the interests of the masses at the forefront of public imagination (p. 14). Contemporary materialists are equally cognisant of the ‘necessity of progressive and revolutionary forms of nationalism’ (Ahmad, 1992: 76), making an important distinction between imperialist and anti-imperialist nationalisms where the former is concerned with enforcing unity on the basis of conquest and the latter with the task of reclaiming community (Brennan, 1990). Their sympathy for nationalism is thus not unqualified. Particularly for the more Marxist scholars, it is also framed by a Leninist doctrine where nationalist struggles against colonial oppression are a necessary stage in the development of a global revolutionary consciousness (Ashcroft et al., 2007: 141). Poststructuralists, in contrast, typically make no normative distinction between ‘good’ nationalisms and ‘bad’ ones, with the influential Said-BhabhaSpivak trinity united by their respective misgivings towards the national. Pointing towards the complexities and messiness of culture, as well as the illusion of ‘pure’ origins, the idea of nationhood is regarded as a means of enforcing homogeneity on heterogeneity and is therefore inherently violent, essentialist and oppressive. Like materialists, poststructuralists also acknowledge their indebtedness to anti-colonial theorists like Fanon and Cabral. However, such accounts are typically seen as an earlier, and therefore less developed, articulation of postcolonial consciousness which has since turned towards an emancipatory appreciation of the hybrid and the heterogeneous (e.g. Pieterse and Parekh, 1995). Poststructuralist postcolonial scholars challenge the purported liberatory aspects of anti-colonial nationalisms, highlighting their often dire consequences for minorities including women, tendency to lapse

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into nativism and separatism and failure to bring actual justice to formerly colonised peoples, having instead entrenched the position of unscrupulous national elites in many parts of the Third World. Significantly, these failings are not considered mere historical contingencies, but rather embedded in the principle of nationalism itself that is deemed to mask an insidious replication of Western hegemony. Spivak (1999: 62), for example, regards nation as ‘a reverse or displaced legitimation of colonialism’, doomed to repeat the ‘epistemic violence’ of the colonialism it had rejected. Said (1994: xxiv) similarly suggests that ‘binary oppositions are dear to [both] the nationalist and imperialist enterprise’. Other scholars even go so far as to suggest that it was the ‘force of nationalism’, in particular the way in which expansionism contributed to solidifying the European nationalist model, ‘that fuelled the growth of colonialism in the first place’ (Ashcroft et al., 2007: 137). Any emancipatory potential of nationalism is considered tainted by its intertwinings with Western modernity. Many poststructuralist scholars have accordingly sought to elaborate wider normative imaginaries that surpass the nationalist one and may therefore better serve the cause of decolonisation, including planetarity and regionalism (Spivak, 2003, 2009), hybridity and cosmopolitanism (Bhabha, 1994) and humanism (Said, 1994). Nationalism is neither an inevitability nor universal necessity. As Renan (1990: 20) declared in 1882, ‘nations are not eternal. They have a beginning and they will have an end’. There is thus important merit to the pursuit of imagining alternative models of political community, and from a postcolonial perspective it is important that our imaginations are not limited to what currently exists. A materialist perspective, however, warns us against the all-tooeasy identification of nationalist rhetoric with the West. It is prudent to recall that some of the ‘first nationalists were not Frenchmen, Spaniards or Englishmen, but the creole middle classes of the New World – people like Simon Bolivar, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Ben Franklin’ (Brennan, 1990: 58–9). Perhaps it is also unfair to consider Third World nationalism itself to be directly responsible for the failures of decolonisation, which are arguably more to do with the geo-political reshuffling that took place post-World War Two, including the instatement of US neo-imperial global hegemony (see Hopkins, 2008). Furthermore, the insistence on seeing nationalism as exclusively Western frames anti-colonial nationalisms as inherently derivative of European models, taking the necessary syncretism of anti-colonial struggles as evidence of co-option and reducing the unique specificities and trajectories of nation building in colonised locations (Anderson, 1991; Chatterjee, 1993). In this regard, the poststructuralist critique risks committing the cardinal sin of postcolonial inquiry, recentring and reproducing the West as both point of origin and comparison. The question I want to ask is whether the materialist insistence on normatively distinguishing between imperialist and anti-imperialist nationalisms may be usefully turned towards Western contexts. While this is all too often approached in the geo-political terms of the nationalisms of ‘domineering

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states and those resisting oppression’ (Löwy in Lazarus, 1995: 75), the distinction between nationalisms that enforce unity and those that reclaim community may be helpful to distinguish between different political struggles within the West. After all, as Aijaz Ahmad (1992: 102) submits, ‘whether or not a nationalism will produce a progressive cultural practice depends’ not on location as if nationalisms were singular and cohesive, but rather ‘upon the political character of the power bloc which takes hold of it and utilises it, as a material force, in the process of constituting its own hegemony’. For ethnocultural minorities in Western societies, many of whom have called such places their home for generations, there is a clear difference between national discourses that call for assimilation into a certain model of national community and those that allow space for different modes of belonging. This is most certainly a postcolonialist concern, considering that national formations are historically implicated in the European colonial enterprise (Tiffin, 1995: 95), something that Indigenous peoples know only too well. Furthermore, it is evident that the cultural diversity that characterises many Western societies is framed to a significant extent by colonialism and its remnants. The partial failings of decolonisation to bring justice to formerly colonised peoples (not to mention the massive wealth differentials between the First and Third Worlds that this period produced) continue to play a critical role in guiding migration flows from the periphery to the metropole. Contemporary neo-imperialism – most stridently in the form of US interests – has contributed in a very significant way to the outbreak of wars and conflicts that constitute key migratory ‘push’ factors; Iraq is just one example. Similarly, the particular type of cultural diversity we find in many former colonising countries is intimately connected to the colonies they once controlled, with former colonial subjects (at least historically) granted easier access to residency and citizenship in the metropole. I am thinking here, for instance, of the Indonesian population in the Netherlands (Indonesia being formerly under Dutch colonial administration) or the strong South Asian and Caribbean communities in Britain. As Said (1994: 282) writes, ‘a legacy of connections still binds colonising countries and their former colonies’. These connections do not just influence local patterns of cultural diversity but also help to construct the imaginative geography of the metropolitan space (Bhabha, 1990: 319). There is good reason to think that much anti-imperialist and postcolonial politics now takes place directly within the space of the Western metropole, directly or indirectly taking Western national formations as a political object of struggle. Bhabha (1990) gestures towards this in Nation and Narration – although it is interesting that his textualist reading of nation as enforcing homogeneity on heterogeneity precludes the possibility of minority struggles impinging directly on the national imaginary. Engaging the nation as an unstable and ambivalent ‘process of cultural signification’ (p. 1), Bhabha seeks to highlight the ways in which the necessary incompleteness of national discourse produces a ‘double-time’ split between its pedagogical dimensions – that is, the

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disciplining power of official claims to represent ‘the people’ – and its performative aspects, which is the lived realities of the people interpellated as national subjects. The performative, for Bhabha, always undercuts the pedagogical, exposing the partialities of its meanings, histories and images of cultural authority (p. 4), with minorities and all those Others who sit at the margins of the nation playing the most unsettling role. The marginal expose the contingency of the nation’s foundational narratives and dearest imaginaries, turning them inside out. ‘America leads to Africa; the nations of Europe and Asia meet in Australia; the margins of the nation displace the centre; the peoples of the periphery return to rewrite the history and fiction of the metropolis’ (p. 7). Yet, what is significant is that he interprets this rewriting as a process ‘whereby the anti-nationalist, ambivalent nation-space becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture’ (p. 5). The implication here is that minority struggles can only be conducted in an anti-nationalist vein and necessarily extend beyond the imaginary of the national. This is perhaps not surprising given his casual casting of the nation in terms of ‘totalising boundaries’ and ‘essentialist’ identity (p. 300; see also Chrisman, 2004: 194). Not only does this seemingly lay out a stark choice for minorities between repression or resistance, but would appear to take the nationalist depiction of national culture as uniform, cohesive and stable at face value (Jusdanis, 2001: 28). This is where Chrisman’s (2004: 198) caution in the epigraph becomes prudent. In presuming that nation can only ever be an expression of essentialism, is Bhabha himself essentialising national community? If we accept that nations ‘are contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimise people’s access to the rights and resources of the nation-state’ (McClintock, 1993: 61) then it seems fair to presume that minority struggles may also be conducted within these systems in order to achieve material aims, which include the symbolic distribution of recognition. Other postcolonial scholarship indeed hints at this possibility. In her short book with Judith Butler, for instance, Spivak (2007) reckons with the political meanings and implications of street demonstrations that broke out in the spring of 2006 in California, where illegal residents sang the US national anthem in Spanish provoking a sharp rebuke from then president George W. Bush, who claimed that the national anthem can only be sung in English. As much as Spivak remains deeply suspicious of the national utopia being claimed by the protestors, arguing instead for a ‘critical regionalism’ that would entail the reinvention of the capitalist state (p. 77), the exchange nevertheless challenges us to think about the ways in which minority struggles for rights, resources and recognition may mobilise the discourse of nation and perform alternative national communities. From a different perspective, the British-Caribbean cultural theorist Paul Gilroy brings into clearer view the ways in which the desire and demand for recognition of difference is entangled with the national. Famous for the book Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), which explored the historical development of a trans-Atlantic Black diasporic consciousness, Gilroy took

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issue in a 1990 exchange that implied he was against nation. One of the points of the intervention, he argued, was to challenge ‘a situation where “race”, nation, culture and ethnicity are used almost as synonyms’ (p. 117). Rather than accept the polarising terms of ‘for’ or ‘against’, which ‘abolishes the space and opportunity for anti-racist intervention’, Gilroy argues for the necessity of a ‘new line of thought’ that: turn[s] on the alternative couplet both/and. I make no apology for the fact that this shift in my own thinking arises from a desire to be recognised as being both black and English in addition to everything else that I am. (my emphasis) This is far more nuanced than Bhabha’s anti-nationalist view of minority struggles. While Gilroy similarly gestures towards a new transnational culture, this transnationalism is embedded within the national imaginary as well as beyond it. Such a desire is arguably far more common to recognition struggles than we typically account for. The challenge is how we read its implications for conceptualising nation, identity and political community. Calhoun’s (2007) discursive approach is helpful here, because it is able to account for nation as a site of cultural contestation and political struggle. While we ought not underestimate the limits presented by hegemonic visions of national identity, culture and belonging, conceding that these are open to rearticulation is a pertinent component of acknowledging the agency of minority groups and their capacities for resistance through transformation. Moreover, in demonstrating how crucial nationalism is to contemporary social realities, Calhoun reminds us that it is unreasonable, if not somewhat unfair, to expect that minority groups are not to some degree interpellated into the national imaginaries of the societies in which they live.7 One of the ways in which hegemony works is its constant interpellation of new subjects, and the institutional and legal dimensions of citizenship mean that we are all homo nationalis in the sense that we are (re)produced as national beings from the moment we are born until the moment we die (Balibar, 2004: 12). In our globalised world, there are very few people who have not been brought into the hegemony of Western modernity – even those at its most fringe margins, like Indigenous peoples in remote locations, are in some way implicated in modernity, whether by virtue of interactions with institutions or representatives of the state and international political bodies. If the intertwining of colonialism with modernity has led postcolonial scholars to think about alternative modernities (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2000), it is legitimate to think about how the interpellation of increasingly diverse subjects may produce alternative national communities. To be sure, minorities can and often do have ambivalent relationships to the dominant national communities in which they live, even as they may feel varying levels of identification, affiliation and belonging. Similarly, minority struggles for recognition do very often fall into the transnational and the diasporic and have thus powerful implications for

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thinking about the world beyond the nation-state paradigm. Nonetheless, if we do not take seriously how these may work on and within local imaginaries of nation, we are wont to risk an important aspect of social life and, importantly, of democratic politics and struggle.

Nation and Australia In this final section, I would like to demonstrate the creative dimensions of national formations and their capacity to incorporate diversity with reference to the Australian example. As a settler colonial society, Australia is a germane location from which to think about nation from a postcolonial perspective. Settler colonies are produced through large-scale population transfer from the ‘motherland’ to establish dominion elsewhere (Veracini, 2010). This means that the particularities of nation building in settler colonial contexts follow quite different trajectories than those taken in Europe, for example. Calhoun (2007: 30) suggests that the Eurocentrism of dominant thinking about nationalism manifests in a number of assumptions, including, amongst others, the idea that nation and empire are opposed and that ‘nations are always already available only to be called forth in new mobilisations for action or discourses of legitimacy’.8 Neither of these hold in a context like the Australian. Firstly, as a product of British settler colonialism, the question of national identity in Australia is fundamentally connected to the expansion of the British Empire (Lawson, 1995: 168). The notion of any Australian nation was only made possible through invasion and the dispossession of the country’s original inhabitants, whose claim to land (and in many cases, life) was stripped away by the British Crown. Unlike in Europe, where the Treaty of Westphalia facilitated an imaginary in which the forging of nation-states was portrayed as merely a ‘domestic affair’ (Calhoun, 2007: 33), the colonial dimensions of Australian nationhood are unavoidable, even if they have been disavowed for much of the country’s history.9 Secondly, whereas European nationalisms were able to take advantage of unique folk traditions and histories in the creation of nations (Smith, 1986), this is not possible in settler colonies like Australia, where distinctive cultural and ethnic contents are in effect directly transferred from the Mother Country (Stratton and Ang, 1994). Indeed, settler colonies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia were historically imagined in terms of a largely undifferentiated ‘defensive project of “the white man’s country”’ drawn from common British racial stock (Lake, 2003: 352). Settler colonial societies are thus faced with the unique problem of ‘how to create a distinctive national identity without recourse to a pre-existing common culture as raw material’ (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 132). Lorenzo Veracini (2010: 21) submits that the development of settler national identities is characterised by two conflicting tendencies: ‘one striving for indigenisation and national autonomy, the other aiming at neo-European replication and the establishment of a “civilised” pattern of life’. If national communities, as Anderson (1991)

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suggests, are imagined as horizontally moving through time from past to future, settler national communities must be imagined in terms of a far more ambivalent temporality, where the past is simultaneously inherited and transformed. The status of settler colonies as concurrently colonial and postcolonial, colonising and decolonising (Curthoys, 1999: 288)10 is underscored by historical processes of settler decolonisation, in which countries like Australia and Canada loosened their ties to the motherland but only received partial independence (Hopkins, 2008). Australia, for its part, remains a monarchy. Settler colonies have gone about the processes of transforming colonial inheritances into a new and distinctive national culture in different ways; in Latin America, for instance, the notion of mestizaje was critical to imagining nations that were racially neither Europeans nor Indians. In their comparison of American (US) and Australian nationalisms, Jon Stratton and Ien Ang (1994) suggest that the project of nation building in Australia took place through cultural means. Whereas the development of a distinct American national identity was facilitated by its War of Independence against Britain, drawing on political ideology grounded in Enlightenment principles, Australia has separated from Britain only very gradually and with little conflict. Britishness has historically played a central, if nevertheless ambivalent, role in the development of an Australian national identity. For much of Australian history since the establishment of the first British colony at Botany Bay (now Sydney) in 1788, ‘Australians saw themselves, and were seen by others, as part of a group of new, transplanted, predominantly Anglo-Saxon emigrant societies’ (White, 1981: 47). Certainly, ‘Australia’ was not a term until 1816 and did not enter into popular circulation until the 1830s. It was not until a couple of decades before federation in 1901, in which the separate colonies formed the unified nation-state of Australia, that any sense of a distinct Australian ‘national type’ emerged. In many ways, this was defined by being more British than the British themselves. Widely ‘believed to be a new product of the multiplying British stock’, the Australian national type was embedded in racialist concerns, the ideology of social Darwinism and the doctrine of racial superiority as a civilising force (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 140). Stratton and Ang argue that it is in this regard that the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 – the so-called White Australia Policy – can be understood as the foundational effort of Australian nation building (p. 141). As one of the first major legislative issues dealt with by the fledgling Australian parliament, the White Australia Policy prohibited the immigration of the ‘coloured races’ – enacted not explicitly, but rather through the use of a dictation test in any European language chosen by the immigration officer – and sought to exclude any immigrants deemed to pose a threat to the racial purity of the nation. This was in practice for the most part directed towards the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the Chinese and Japanese and the regulation of ‘Kanaka’ South Sea Islander labourers. While the Immigration Restriction Act underwent various reconfigurations over time and was eventually replaced by the

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less restrictive Migration Act in 1958, the core notion of a racialised Britishness (interestingly recoded as inclusive of the Irish in the particularly Antipodean category ‘Anglo-Celtic’) was nevertheless woven into the structuring stories, symbols and mythologies of Australian nationhood. If ‘terra nullius’ (land belonging to no one) was the fiction that facilitated the European colonisation of Australia, the White Australia Policy can be seen as having instituted the myth of ‘cultura nullius’, which erased the existence of nonEuropean cultures in the country through an exaggerated rhetoric of cultural and racial homogeneity (Chan, 1999). As foundational mythologies, both are decidedly Eurocentric. In Ann Curthoys’ (1999: 280) formulation, one relates to the taking of land for the Europeans while the other relates to keeping that land for the Europeans. Significantly, both generated a hegemonic national order in which the Australian ‘mainstream’ is coded as Anglo-Celtic (Stratton, 1998: 171). As much as the White Australia Policy sought to lay the foundations for a racially pure Australian nation, this vision was necessarily compromised by the realities of a reliance on sustained immigration. This became evident in the post-World War Two reconstruction period, where economic and security concerns demanded mass immigration as encapsulated in the immigration minister Arthur Calwell’s dictum to ‘populate or perish’. While this dependence on immigration did not undo the White Australia Policy, it did liberalise it insofar as the contents of ‘whiteness’ became diversified (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 145). While still preferring British immigration (so-called ‘Ten Pound Poms’ arriving on the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme), the numbers of British immigrants was less than expected. The government thus established immigration agreements with countries in Northern and Eastern Europe, before extending to the Europeans from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. A small amount of non-European migration was also allowed under certain circumstances. As immigration slowly diversified, the focus on racial homogeneity shifted to an emphasis on cultural homogeneity. This was represented in the policy of assimilation, where immigrants were expected to assimilate into the ‘Australian way of life’. To a significant extent, this way of life still hinged on a notion of European British culture, even if the policy of assimilation can be read as having signalled a shift to a more ‘modern’ form of nationalism that highlighted ‘standards of living and domestic progress’ as opposed to anything approximating a ‘local folk primordiality’ (Castles et al., 1990: 114). At the same time, assimilation required the development of a more substantive vision of national commonality, which went some way in loosening the ‘colonial shackles and … forcing [Australia] to distinguish itself from British racial/cultural identity’ (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 146). The most significant historical shift in the Australian national imaginary was the policy of multiculturalism instituted in 1973, some years after the official abandonment in the mid-1960s of the White Australia Policy and immigration restrictions on the basis of colour and national origin. The institution of multiculturalism was in part connected to the general failure of

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assimilation: contrary to expectations, immigrant minorities continued to keep their homeland traditions. However, Stratton and Ang suggest that multiculturalism should not be seen as only ‘a new policy for dealing with immigrants’ but rather a ‘national cultural policy’ directly concerned with the constitution of Australian identity (p. 149). Indeed, multiculturalism was widely framed in terms of changing the image of Australia from a ‘colonial racist backwater’ to a progressive, liberal-thinking nation (Grassby, 1973). Australian multiculturalism from the outset has fundamentally tied the provision of special services to ethnic groups with the (re)constitution of national identity. The 1982 pamphlet, Multiculturalism for all Australians: Our developing nationhood, is strongly indicative of this bent, emphasising that multiculturalism requires the recognition that we can each be ‘a real Australian’ without necessarily being ‘a typical Australian’ (p. 17). The vision of national community the policy of multiculturalism laid out was thus relatively unique. Rather than undercutting a perceived cultural homogeneity, cultural diversity was portrayed as constitutive of Australian national identity and culture. Similarly, as opposed to a backward-looking orientation, the Australian nation was imagined as fundamentally forward looking. As such, because: Australian multiculturalism expressly incorporates ethnic difference within the space of the national, it provides a framework for a politics of negotiation over the very content of the national culture, which is no longer imagined as something fixed and historically given but as something in the process of becoming. (Stratton and Ang, 1994: 152) For Stratton and Ang, there are two key reasons why multiculturalism could be imagined in terms of a national policy in Australia. The first is the ‘relative underdetermination of Australian identity by either ideology or culture’ (p. 147). The Australian way of life heralded by the policy of assimilation was not only relatively vague and lacking in historical and cultural density, but the lack of specific ethnic contents to the White Australia policy – which was rather reductively framed in terms of racial appearance – made the national imaginary more amenable to incorporating different ethnicities. Importantly, ‘the discourse of race’ in the White Australia policy ‘was used to mark the limits of the Australian imagined community, [but] not distinctions within it’ (p. 141, my emphasis). The second is that the ‘artificialness’ of the linkage between nation and state is particularly evident in settler colonial contexts like Australia (p. 150). As such, the disarticulation of state and nation represented by the policy of multiculturalism positioned ‘the state as the guarantor of historical continuity’ but allowed for a conception of nationhood as unfolding across time, as opposed to demarking fixed cultural or ethnic referents (p. 148). To this list we could add Australia’s island territoriality and lack of separatist movements that pose a serious threat to the sovereign integrity of the

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nation-state. Both of these elements mean that contestation over territorial borders is minimal, and thus arguably make it easier to imagine national culture as a negotiated site of incorporation of new elements into an Australian way of life. Australian multiculturalism has been quite successful. Public and political support for the policy has waxed and waned over time, suffering a particular blow in the mid-1990s with the election of the conservative nationalist prime minister John Howard who held office for 11 years. Nevertheless, the ideology of multiculturalism – namely, that Australia is culturally diverse and cultural diversity is a good thing – would appear to have taken root in Australian national imaginations. While public opinion polls would suggest that many Australians balk at ‘hard multiculturalism’ involving government support for cultural maintenance, which is presumed to encourage separatism (the main exceptions here are non-English speaking background communities themselves, for whom such policies open up access to certain resources), attitudes towards ‘soft multiculturalism’ and ethnic and cultural diversity more generally tend to be favourable, even if marked by certain ambiguities including a valorising of unity (Markus, 2011). The example of Reclaim Australia from Chapter 1 is illustrative of this naturalising of the ideology of cultural diversity into the Australian national imaginary. As much as Reclaim Australia is anti-multiculturalism, it is telling that the movement has striven (however clumsily) to emphasise its ‘inclusiveness’ to Australians of all ethnic and racial stripes. The group’s, at time of writing, defunct website lauds the country’s ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage’. At the same time, it also acknowledges indigenous Aboriginal peoples as the ‘first Australians’ and explicitly declares Australia ‘a mongrel nation’ made up of different ethnicities and cultures. It is interesting to note, too, that the first Reclaim Australia rallies involved the participation of a number of Asian, African and Indian Australians connected to Danny Nalliah’s evangelical Catch the Fire Christian ministry. Nalliah himself is of Sri Lankan origin, and runs his own anti-multiculturalism political party, Rise Up Australia. Attending a rally in Melbourne, the Australian media personality and political satirist John Safran (2015) observed a ‘very multicultural anti-multicultural rally’, which even included an acknowledgement of the Wurundjeri as traditional owners of the land. This is, of course, not to suggest that Reclaim Australia is somehow less problematic because of this, or that their attempts at inclusivity are not tokenistic or appropriative. There is undeniably a powerful white nationalist core to Reclaim Australia’s Islamophobia, and Safran himself notes that Nalliah is likely ‘leveraging secular white Australia’s xenophobia to serve his Christian agenda’. Still, the group’s concern with the rhetoric of inclusion and diversity is arguably indicative of just how ingrained the two are in the construction of the Australian national space. The ‘unity-in-diversity’ formulation of Australian multiculturalism nevertheless makes for a distinct set of problems in the Australian imaginary. Not only are the limits of national culture set precisely where differences are

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deemed counter-productive to the harmony ostensibly symbolised by unity-indiversity, but the centrality of the state in managing and organising cultural diversity contains the expression of cultural differences that fall outside officially sanctioned channels. In this regard, Stratton and Ang suggest that ‘the national community can only be imagined as a “unity in diversity” by a containment of cultural difference’ making it an ‘ultimately exclusionary ideological construct’ (p. 153). This most certainly has powerful implications for Australia’s Indigenous peoples, whose cultural distinctiveness is the foundation of a political claim that threatens to disrupt the vision of national unity. Indeed, multiculturalism has never been an adequate or sufficient response to the specific and distinctive claims, needs and concerns of Indigenous Australians (Calma, 2007). While official policy documents have typically included an acknowledgement of the ‘special status’ of Aboriginal people in Australia,11 such acknowledgements have been and remain mostly superficial due to the immigrant focus of Australian multiculturalism. Multiculturalism in Australia has always been a policy and discourse formulated with the figure of the immigrant in mind: indeed, the opening sentence of the very first policy document, ‘Australia is a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants’ (Grassby, 1973: 1), betrays the fundamental exclusion of Indigenous Australians. As Peter Read (1998: 171–2) maintains, ‘many nonAboriginal Australians have yet to come to terms with Aboriginality as an element of Australian diversity’. If the racial limits instituted by the White Australia policy are apparent in the seeming inability of multiculturalism to pay more than lip service to Aboriginal cultural difference, multiculturalism’s focus on ethnicity may be read as similarly redrawing the centrality of Anglos in the Australian national imaginary. In designating immigrant groups as ‘ethnics’, and imagining ethnic difference as ‘enriching’ the nation, multicultural imaginaries all too often posit Anglo Australia as the neutral ground upon which processes of cultural diversification take place. The official sanctioning of cultural diversity is indeed widely charged with fetishising the culture of immigrant communities while leaving the particularity of Anglo culture unmarked (e.g. Hage, 1998). Rather than offering a genuine space of negotiation over the content of Australian national identity, Stratton and Ang (1994: 154) submit that ‘official multiculturalism’ may very well be complicit in suppressing ‘the continued hegemony of Anglo-Celtic Australian culture by making it invisible’.

Conclusion This chapter has primarily been concerned with laying out a conceptualisation of nation as a discursive construct with the capacity for rearticulation through political struggle. It is this last point, however, that I would like to end by reflecting upon. It is most certainly the case, as Ann Curthoys (1999: 290) insists, that the ‘persistence of the structures and mentality of colonialism [in Australia] has implications for the ideal of multiculturalism that have

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yet been little recognised’. As I have sought to argue in this chapter, nations are best understood in discursive terms as cultural and political projects, rather than inheritances. Similarly, I have aimed to engage them as dynamic formations caught somewhere between continuity and change. In Australia, that multiculturalism is often employed as a mandate to keep cultural difference self-enclosed and ethnicised, leaving ‘mainstream’ national culture untouched and unmarked, is certain. It is indeed a core analytical presumption in much scholarship that the persistence of the white Anglo as the prototypical national is the defining feature in Australian national imaginaries and is one of the key ways in which cultural diversity is contained, managed and disciplined in Australia (e.g. Hage, 1998; Stratton, 1998). Yet, the fact that Australian multiculturalism offers possibilities for the renegotiation of the contents of national identity means that there is space, however restricted it may be in practice, for minority groups to partake in the collective project of national self-definition. What I want to suggest, and what this book ultimately argues, is that cultural minorities – those designated Other – do play an active and purposeful role in the process of national rearticulation. More directly, I want to suggest that the hegemonic centrality of the white Anglo in Australian national imaginaries is not lost on them, but rather feeds into and shapes their particular struggles for the recognition of difference. In claiming difference, minorities politicise precisely the dominant terms of national community that would otherwise have them marginalised. In doing so, they reveal their partialities and seek to hold them accountable, as it were. If this chapter has sought to develop an understanding of nation that makes such an interpretation possible, we are still to reckon with the other side of the equation – struggles for recognition themselves. Accordingly, it is with this task that we enter into Chapter 3.

Notes 1 The political dimension is all too often dropped from popular appropriations of Benedict Anderson’s (1991) formulation of nations as ‘imagined political communities’. This potentially has problematic implications for distinguishing nations from other forms of communities – most of which, as Anderson (1991: 5) notes, are equally imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest [group] will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them’. 2 Given the importance of national self-determination struggles, this is an incredibly important point. We can see, for instance, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the nefarious ends to which the denial of nationhood is put. One of the most common arguments against the Palestinian national struggle is precisely that the Palestinians do not constitute a nation. 3 In this lecture, Renan (1990: 15–16) offered a pertinent warning against seeking to locate the origins of nation in ethnicity: ‘Be on your guard, for this ethnographic politics is in no way a stable thing and, if you use it against others, tomorrow you may see it turned against yourselves’. 4 Anthony D. Smith (2008) asks us to remember that ‘ordinary people’ is too a nationalist construct.

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5 It perhaps is in this regard that a postcolonial ethos can be likened to Antonio Gramsci’s famous dictum ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. 6 I am aware that many postcolonial scholars would take issue with being placed in one camp or the other. Spivak, for instance, employs literary, feminist and Marxist theory in her work. Likewise, Said often expressed his discomfort with being labelled a ‘postcolonialist’ at all, and with his commitment to the Palestinian struggle was arguably a humanist above all else. In employing the distinction between ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘materialist’ postcolonial scholarship as a heuristic device for tracing debates, disagreements and controversies in the field, I by no means intend to take away from the unique contributions and perspectives of postcolonial scholars. 7 There is arguably also a contradiction between seeing diasporic or transnational imaginaries (both of which are nationalist constructs) as relevant to minority experiences and politics, but not national ones. 8 The persistence of such Eurocentric assumptions in scholarship is striking. In delivering a conference presentation based on certain key ideas in this book, for instance, I was sharply rebuked by a colleague because ‘Australia is not a nation’. 9 See Chapter 6 for a discussion on the implications of Australian nation building for Aboriginal peoples. 10 This insight is also used to highlight the difficulties of Indigenous decolonisation in settler colonial contexts (see Chapter 6). 11 The National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia (Office of Multicultural Affairs, 1989), for instance, declared that multiculturalism is ‘applicable not just to immigrants but to all Australians, including the Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population’.

References Ahmad, A. (1992) In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso. Armstrong, J.A. (1982) Nations before nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Arnanson, J.P. (2001) ‘Nations and nationalism: From general theory to comparative history’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 22(1): 79–89. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (2007) Post-colonial studies: The key concepts, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Australian Council on Population and Ethnic Affairs (1982) Multiculturalism for all Australians: Our developing nationhood. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Balibar, E. (2004) We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship, trans. J. Swenson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bhabha, H.K. (ed.) (1990) Nation and narration. Abingdon: Routledge. Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The location of culture. London: Routledge. Billig, M. (1995) Banal nationalism. London: Sage. Brennan, T. (1990) ‘The national longing for form’. In H.K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and narration (pp. 44–70). Abingdon: Routledge. Brennan, T. (2013) ‘Joining the party’. Postcolonial Studies 16(1): 68–78. Brubaker, R. (2004) ‘In the name of the nation: Reflections on nationalism and patriotism’. Citizenship Studies 8(2): 115–127. Cabral, A. (1974) ‘National liberation and culture’. Transition 45: 12–17. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Calhoun, C. (2007) Nations matter: Culture, history and the cosmopolitan dream. New York: Routledge. Calma, T. (2007) Multiculturalism: A position paper by the Acting Race Discrimination Commissioner. Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Castles, S., Kalantzis, M., Cope, B. and Morrissey, M. (1990) Mistaken identity: Multiculturalism and the demise of nationalism in Australia, 2nd ed. Sydney: Pluto Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chan, A. (1999) ‘Playing with words’. In G. Hage and R. Couch (eds), The future of Australian multiculturalism: Reflections on the 20th anniversary of Jean Martin’s ‘The Migrant Presence’ (pp. 9–20). Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chrisman, L. (2004) ‘Nationalism and postcolonial studies’. In Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (pp. 183–198). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curthoys, A. (1999) ‘An uneasy conversation: Multicultural and indigenous discourses’. In G. Hage and R. Couch (eds), The future of Australian multiculturalism: Reflections on the 20th anniversary of Jean Martin’s ‘The Migrant Presence’ (pp. 277–293). Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Edensor, T. (2002) National identity, popular culture and everyday life. Oxford: Berg. Fanon, F. (1965) The wretched of the earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Peregrine. Foucault, M. (1981) ‘The order of discourse’. In R. Young (ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 48–78). London: Routledge. Fox, J. and Miller-Idriss, C. (2008) ‘Everyday nationhood’. Ethnicities 8(4): 536–563. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gilroy, P. (1987) There ain’t no black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. London: Unwin Hyman. Gilroy, P. (1990) ‘Nationalism, history and ethnic absolutism’. History Workshop 3: 114–120. Grassby, A.J. (1973) A multi-cultural society for the future: Immigration reference paper. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Hage, G. (1998) White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Annandale: Pluto Press. Herzfeld, M. (1997) Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. New York: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E. (1990) Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T.O. (eds) (1983) The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, A.G. (2008) ‘Rethinking decolonization’. Past and Present 200(1): 211–247. Jusdanis, G. (2001) The necessary nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lake, M. (2003) ‘White man’s country: The trans-national history of a national project’. Australian Historical Studies 34: 346–363.

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Lawson, A. (1995) ‘The discovery of nationality in Australian and Canadian literatures’. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 167–169). London: Routledge. Lazarus, N. (1995) Nationalism and cultural practice in the postcolonial world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lofgren, O. (1989) ‘The nationalisation of culture’. Ethnologea Europaea XIX: 5–23. Mandler, P. (2006) ‘What is “national identity”? Definitions and applications in modern British historiography’. Modern Intellectual History 3(2): 271–297. Markus, A. (2011) ‘Attitudes to multiculturalism and cultural diversity’. In J. Jupp and M. Clyne (eds), Multiculturalism and integration: A harmonious relationship (pp. 89–100). Canberra: ANU Press. McClintock, A. (1993) ‘Family feuds: Gender, nationalism and the family’. Feminist Review 44: 61–80. Nairn, T. (1997) Faces of nationalism: Janus revisited. London: Verso. Office of Multicultural Affairs (1989) National agenda for a multicultural Australia … Sharing our future. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. Parekh, B. (1995) ‘The concept of national identity’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 21(1): 255–268. Parry, B. (1994) ‘Signs of our times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture’. Third Text 28/9: 5–24. Parry, B. (2004) ‘The institutionalisation of postcolonial studies’. In Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge companion to postcolonial literary studies (pp. 66–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pieterse, J.N. and Parekh, B. (eds) (1995) The decolonization of imagination: Culture, knowledge and power. London: Zed Books. Read, P. (1998) ‘Whose citizens? Whose country?’ In N. Peterson and W. Sanders (eds), Citizenship and indigenous Australians: Changing conceptions and possibilities (pp. 169–178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renan, E. (1990) ‘What is a nation?’, trans. Martin Thom. In H.K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and narration (pp. 8–22). Abingdon: Routledge. Safran, J. (2015) ‘John Safran reports from the Reclaim Australia rally, where things were even scarier than he expected’. news.com.au, 22 July. www.news.com.au/lifestyle/rea l-life/news-life/john-safran-reports-from-the-reclaim-australia-rally-where-things-were-ev en-scarier-than-he-expected/news-story/e83619ed3c7ce1878520c2b26a798a9c (accessed 20 January 2017). Said, E.W. (1988) ‘Identity, negation and violence’. New Left Review 171: 46–60. Said, E.W. (1994) Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Slemon, S. (1995) ‘The scramble for post-colonialism’. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 45–54). London: Routledge. Smith, A.D. (1986) The ethnic origins of nations. New York: Wiley. Smith, A.D. (1994) ‘The problem of national identity: Ancient, medieval, and modern?’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 17(3): 375–399. Smith, A.D. (2008) ‘The limits of everyday nationhood’. Ethnicities 8(4): 563–573. Spivak, G.C. (1999) A critique of postcolonial reason: Towards a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, G.C. (2003) Death of a discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Spivak, G.C. and Butler, J. (2007) Who sings the nation-state? Language, politics, belonging. Oxford: Seagull Books. Spivak, G.C. (2009) ‘Nationalism and the imagination’. Lectora 15: 75–98.

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Stratton, J. (1998) Race daze: Australia in identity crisis. Annandale: Pluto Press. Stratton, J. and Ang, I. (1994) ‘Multicultural imagined communities: Cultural difference and national identity in the USA and Australia’. Continuum 8(2): 124–158. Tiffin, H. (1995) ‘Post-colonial literatures and counter-discourse’. In B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 95–98). London: Routledge. Veracini, L. (2010) Settler colonialism: A theoretical overview. London: Palgrave Macmillan. White, R. (1981) Inventing Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. (2002) ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’. Global Networks 2(4): 301–334. Young, R.J.C. (1990) White mythologies: Writing history and the West. London: Routledge.

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Postcolonial politics of recognition?

The wars of recognition are here to stay. (Bauman, 2001: 148)

The demand for recognition seemingly constitutes the contemporary horizons of social justice. While earlier political struggles, the narrative goes, focused on the achievement of equal rights and citizenship (such as the women’s suffrage movement), there has been a decisive turn towards difference since at least the 1960s, wherein marginalised, disparaged and denigrated social groups have fought to have their particularities affirmed, esteemed and valued in and of themselves. From second-wave feminism’s insistence on the positive revaluation of femininity, to anti-colonial struggles for the affirmation of Third World cultures to gay, lesbian and queer demands for their identities to be acknowledged in the public sphere, there is no shortage of politics mounted under the banner of ‘difference’, whether that be race, sexuality, gender or ethnicity. To be ‘recognised’ in this contemporary configuration of justice is to contest dominant social and cultural norms and patterns of representation that marginalise certain groups, and which deem their differences inferior, derivative or ‘less-than’. In seeking affirmation of particularity, struggles for recognition often pivot on the demand for differentiated rights and citizenship. We are all different, the claim for recognition goes, and we each deserve to be positively esteemed for our particular identity, culture or way of life. ‘Due recognition,’ Charles Taylor (1994: 26) wrote in the essay that would come to define a theoretical paradigm, ‘is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need’. It is now some 25 years since Taylor first published his essay and the ‘politics of recognition’ emerged as a theoretical framework with which to make sense of the centrality of identity and difference in contemporary social struggles. Grounded in the Hegelian insight that human beings depend on relations of recognition to develop subjectivity and identity, recognition theory has a psychological and normative dimension – we become ‘who we are’ by virtue of our relations with others and the larger communities of which we are a part, and these relations, in turn, lay out certain moral expectations and conceptions of the good life. Political theories of recognition

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bring this insight to the domain of politics to develop a vision of justice more cognisant of how human subjects are intersubjectively constituted and enmeshed in their socio-cultural surroundings. This dialogical approach to the self is very often held up in opposition to the monological self of traditional liberal theory, which is variously charged with abstracting subjects of their social particularity (Taylor, 1994) and dislocating individual freedom and selfrealisation from social relations (Honneth, 2012). As such, political theories of recognition have been accorded a central role in the challenges presented by cultural and social diversity to contemporary liberal societies (Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 1), and have in many cases come to be equated with the concerns of multiculturalism, which similarly advocates for the affirmation of particularity (Smith, 2010: 150). Recognition theory does indeed seem to speak to such debates with clout. Its acknowledgement of how our cultural backgrounds afford us ‘horizons of value’ (Taylor, 1994; Honneth, 1995) through which we make sense of ourselves and others has been widely celebrated for not only being able to account for the political importance people attach to their identity and culture, but also for its approach to culture as a social good and thus a legitimate site of political struggle. Likewise, in engaging justice in terms of withheld or granted recognition, political theories of recognition develop a vision of justice as relational – that is, concerned with the standing one has vis-à-vis other persons (Young, 1990). This portends to offer rich resources for imagining the contents of human freedom and equality in culturally diverse contexts. Despite its continued resonance as a demand fuelling political claims and social struggles, the recognition paradigm is increasingly falling out of critical favour. Political theories of recognition have always been as controversial as they have influential, sparking an inordinate amount of often charged debate about everything from their treatment of culture and identity to their reading of liberalism (see, for example, responses to Taylor in Gutmann, 1994). In recent years, recognition theory has suffered harsh critique, with its very potential as a critical practice called into question. Contrary to forging the conditions that would actualise human freedom and allow for cultural difference to flourish, recognition is said to serve the ‘unspoken function of inserting individuals or social groups into existing structures of domination by encouraging a positive self-image’ (Honneth, 2012: 75), and is thus complicit in the reproduction of power inequalities. This kind of charge has become common in contemporary postcolonial theory. In this chapter I engage with postcolonial critiques of recognition – not, however, to dismiss its critical potential out of hand. Rather, I want to suggest that not only is the recognition paradigm worth preserving from a postcolonial perspective, but that postcolonial insights are useful for addressing the ‘phenomenological poverty’ of the language of ‘traditional political theory’ (Taylor, 2003: 186), helping us to imagine recognition politics in richer, more dynamic terms. Postcolonial theory has conventionally maintained a relatively uneasy stance towards the politics of recognition, in large part because of its

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entanglements with liberal multiculturalism (Gunew, 2004). With their commitment to engage cultures as hybrid and impure (Said, 1993), postcolonial theorists have long been wary that the politics of recognition works to ‘fix’ cultural difference in a way that fails to consider the complexities of identity in the post-colonial era and is reminiscent of Western modalities of organising difference and Self/Other relations (Bhabha, 2003; Spivak, 2003). It is the challenge launched by the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon to the Hegelian model of recognition, however, that has come to define the postcolonial critique of recognition politics. In pointing to the stark power asymmetries that exist in colonial contexts, Fanon (1967 [1952]) argued that relations of recognition invariably cement the dominant position of the coloniser and compel the colonised to identify with the structures that oppress them. Following Fanon, many contemporary postcolonial scholars maintain that minority groups appealing for recognition in Western contexts risk locking themselves into relations of dependency with the state and dominant society, thus reinforcing their marginal status and entrenching unequal power relations under the façade of equality (e.g. Schaap, 2004). In its hardest form, this critique has led some to challenge whether recognition is in fact the correct framework through which minorities should mount their demands, or whether anti-colonial struggles for social justice should turn their sights elsewhere (e.g. Coulthard, 2007). While postcolonial concerns are valid and indeed prudent given the pervasiveness of Western social, cultural and political hegemony, I argue that recognition theory nevertheless contains important resources for illuminating the dynamics of struggles to affirm difference, as well as the horizons of justice towards which such struggles gesture, in ways that are consonant with postcolonial aims. Rather than approaching recognition theories as ipso facto liberal multiculturalist accounts, I suggest that postcolonial theory would be well served to answer Nicholas Smith’s (2010: 152) call to employ recognition theory to see ‘how multiculturalism “looks from the inside”’. I further argue that postcolonial theory in fact affords a pertinent means of engaging the relationship between ‘misrecognition as a source of conflict’ and ‘recognition as a remedy’ that Smith (2012: 8) suggests remains underdeveloped in recognition theory. To this end, the chapter offers an alternative reading of Fanon’s reflections on recognition. Fanon’s account, I maintain, underscores the ways in which the affirmation of difference is intimately entangled with the rearticulation of political identity, that is, the collective terms in which freedom and equality are imagined. As I conceive of it, political identity cuts into the wider questions of representation in a collectivity – who is represented in a given polity and in whose terms does this representation take place? In some ways, Fanon is akin to the Rorschach inkblot test for scholars: Fanonian perspectives have been read into a variety of stances and projects. While this has spurred several often fiery debates concerning his (mis)appropriation in contemporary scholarship (e.g. Robinson, 1993), this seeming flexibility should above all be considered testament to his work’s theoretical

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and political richness, ranging as it does from sensitive accounts of colonised subjectivity in Black Skin, White Masks (1967 [1952]) to the call for violent revolution in The Wretched of the Earth (1965 [1961]). Fanon does not offer easy answers to the problematics spun out by colonialism, and his ruminations on recognition would indeed seem to suggest that its potential as a critical practice is limited in colonial settings. Nonetheless, his dialectical reading of the colonial situation allows us a unique insight into the constitutive relationship between the experience of misrecognition and the demand for recognition. Like political theorists of recognition (e.g. Taylor, 1994; Fraser, 1997; Honneth, 2012), Fanon regards misrecognition of the cultural particularity of the colonised as emerging out of the denial of equal human dignity. Yet, his vision of recognition as remedy is considerably more nuanced than many popular takes on recognition politics allow for: affirming difference, for Fanon, is powerfully grounded in reconfiguring the universal category of humanity to include those previously excluded. Fanon’s account does not afford us specific political prescriptions, beyond the insight that multidimensional colonial domination demands various struggles mounted on different levels. As I will argue, however, his dialectical understanding of the relationship between difference and the social relations that produce that difference has powerful resonance for opening new modes of interpreting minority recognition claims in Western liberal societies in line with postcolonial concerns. The chapter first offers an overview of the recognition-theoretic paradigm and political theories of recognition before turning to the postcolonial critique and, finally, how I interpret Fanon’s vision of recognition. Let us begin by exploring the concept of recognition in more detail, with a focus on the philosopher whose work has been most influential in shaping the adoption of the concept in most Western philosophy and social theory: George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Recognition, selfhood and identity ‘No man is an island, entire of itself ’ wrote the English poet and cleric John Donne in 1624. This phrase would not just come to embed itself in popular culture but also neatly encapsulates the basic insight into human life driving all scientific and scholarly inquiry, from sociology and its assumption that there is a reciprocal relationship between self and society (Stets and Burke, 2003) to neuroscience and its comprehension that consciousness is not contained in the chunk of flesh we call the brain, but is produced in interaction with the environment around us (Noë, 2009). Human beings are not born tabula rasa as self-determining creatures who simply choose who we are (or, alternatively, organisms whose identities and life paths are genetically imprinted and merely unfold before us). Rather, we inherently depend on relations with others – ranging from our most intimate loved ones to the largest cultural and linguistic communities of which we are a part – to develop

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our sense of self and identity, and truly locate ourselves in and of the world. The concept of recognition plays an important role in theories of the intersubjective development of self and identity: to be ‘recognised’ by someone as something is critical for gaining a sense of selfhood, constituting us as a unique individual subject. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘recognition’ has three distinct meanings – identification based on previous encounters or knowledge; acknowledgement of the existence or validity of something; and affirmation or appreciation of one’s achievements or rights – and we are each ‘recognised’ in these three senses of the word in countless ways every day and throughout our lifetimes. Whether recipient of an unexpected wave from a friend across the street, the tip of the hat of a stranger or an award for our work, being recognised solidifies our sense of social presence, worth and value, affording us distinctiveness and a particular positioning in the social world. Recognition, in this regard, locates and constitutes us as subjects in the webs of social relations in which we exist, both producing and establishing our sense of self and identity (Düttman, 2000). Certainly, psychoanalysts have shown that it is not just recognition from others that is important for the development of subjecthood, but that the recognition of one’s self from an outside perspective is critical for an enlarged understanding of self that considers the place(s) one occupies in the social and symbolic order. Jacques Lacan’s (1977) ‘mirror stage’, for instance, refers to the point at which the infant develops the capacity to see herself as others see her and begins to identify with, and incorporate into her ‘me’, the image of herself that other persons mirror back to her. This understanding of the self as dialogical is the core premise on which the recognition paradigm is based. What distinguishes the paradigm, however, are the conceptions of agency, freedom and morality (norms) this basic insight inspires. This is where Hegel’s account of the ‘struggle for recognition’ as integral to the formation of self-consciousness in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977 [1807]) is pertinent. Tracing how consciousness becomes self-consciousness, Hegel similarly sees the latter as emerging intersubjectively: ‘self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged’ (p. 111). For Hegel, however, this dependency on others’ recognition to develop a sense of one’s self is an inherently unsettling experience, which clashes with the subject’s desire for selfcertainty and independence. After all, our encounters with others are always marked by uncertainty – who is this person? Am I like them? Are they like me? These encounters are made all the more uncertain by the necessity that a self-consciousness must ‘come out of itself’ when confronted with another selfconsciousness, simultaneously finding itself ‘as an other being’ and seeing its own self in the other (p. 111). In this initial encounter, self-consciousness realises that it is something other than what it thought it was, and ‘must supersede the otherness of itself ’ to regain a sense of surety. From this point, Hegel moves on to imagine different scenarios through which this may be achieved. In what he calls the ‘primitive struggle for

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recognition’, self-consciousness seeks the other’s annihilation with the dual aim of eliminating the external threat and reasserting its independence through the willingness to sacrifice its own existence. This ‘trial by death’, however, cannot satisfy the need for recognition, for it ‘do[es] away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, the certainty of self generally’ (p. 114). The dead cannot give recognition, thus the winning selfconsciousness has destroyed the relation required for its very existence. The recognition death battle between two equals is hence a zero-sum game, for each side is unwilling to relinquish its desire for independence to let the other exist. This type of internecine struggle, Hegel postulates, could be overcome if one self-consciousness were to surrender to the other: ‘one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman’ (p. 115). This master–slave relation of domination could thus potentially fulfil the desire for acknowledgement, selfcertainty and independence, as the recognition of one by the other is apparently built into the relation itself with the slave deferring their own independence for that of the master. However, as Hegel goes on to point out, neither can this relation satisfy the desire for recognition. From the master’s perspective,1 the recognition s/he receives from the slave ultimately proves unsatisfying, for the master can only be recognised as an independent self-consciousness by another independent self-consciousness. The bonded dependence of slave to master means that the master does not recognise the slave as an equal consciousness, but rather as a debased object (pp. 116–17). Moreover, the supposed sense of independence that the master derives from the enslavement of the other is revealed to be an illusion. Not only does the master thoroughly depend upon the slave for his/her identity as master, but because the master sees the slave as a negative reflection of his/herself, the domination of the slave also becomes a self-domination: ‘for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other’ (p. 116). Neither the destruction nor the enslavement of the other, Hegel thus submits, can satiate the desire for recognition. The only possibility we are left with is a social formation based on the principle of reciprocal recognition in which the two subjects ‘recognise themselves as mutually recognising one another’ (p. 112). The relation of mutual recognition, in which each subject recognises the other as an equal and equally independent self-consciousness, requires that the subject moves beyond the ‘self-referentiality of mere desire [to] become aware of its dependence of its fellow human subjects’ (Honneth, 2012: 4). Perhaps paradoxically, the subject is able to truly be free and gain a genuine sense of independence and self-certainty only through the restriction of the self in its relations with others. For Hegel, then, our reliance on others to become a self has important implications for how we imagine the necessary conditions for autonomy and the norms, social meanings and moral imperatives that emerge in and through human interaction.

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In contemporary theories of recognition, Axel Honneth’s (1995) elaboration of the Hegelian ideal of mutual recognition is by far the most developed. Seeking to render materially Hegel’s entirely abstract struggle for recognition, Honneth turns to social psychologist George Herbert Mead’s (1932) theory of the intersubjective development of self and practical identity formation to distinguish three different patterns, or stages, of mutual recognition. Each of these, which Honneth locates in a typology, corresponds to ‘a particular potential for moral development and to distinct types of individual relations to self ’ (p. 95). The first he considers in terms of ‘love’ – that is, primary relationships characterised by deep emotional attachments, including those between parent and child, friends and lovers – which, through emotional care, the dependability of attachment and attentiveness to core bodily and affective needs, affords the subject a basic confidence in themselves that is essential for them to participate in public life as an autonomous, independent being (p. 107). As a pattern of reciprocal recognition, the intersubjective experience of love is necessarily prior to all other forms and foundational for a successful, trustbased relation to both self and world. Honneth frames the second in terms of legal relations, which relate to the normative obligations individuals have visà-vis other members of society and is essential for developing self-respect. In contrast to the intimate face to face of love relationships, this pattern of mutual recognition requires an abstracted sense of social relations based on the perspective of the ‘generalised other’; in Mead’s terms, this is the capacity to generalise and thus internalise the social norms of the community of which the subject is a part. Reciprocal recognition in the legal sphere requires that each member of society respect others as right-bearing legal persons of (at least formally) equal moral standing: in this sense, ‘one is able to respect oneself because one deserves the respect of others’ (pp. 118–19). Finally, Honneth suggests that ‘human beings always need – over and above the experience of affectionate care and legal recognition – a form of self esteem that allows them to relate positively to their concrete traits and abilities’ (p. 121). Accordingly, the third pattern of mutual recognition he locates is that related to a community of value, which affords honour and esteem for individual persons’ unique abilities and achievements; this produces social solidarity, insofar as each member of society feels confident that others will recognise as valuable their particular accomplishments and traits (p. 128).

Recognition, politics and difference Honneth’s work affords us an especially clear insight into the bridge between the psychological and the normative in the recognition paradigm. As he shows, the interplay between individuation and socialisation in practices of recognition not only works to construct us as individual subjects, establishing practical relations to self and locating our unique identities in the social world, but also as moral subjects who hold certain normative expectations of how human beings should relate to one another and how we, in turn, deserve

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to be related to. The latter is particularly pertinent to the politics of recognition, for it can explain the nature of social conflict, the moral dimensions of social suffering and the motivational factors guiding social struggles that would seem to resonate – at least observationally – with much of contemporary politics. Structures of recognition associated with respect and social esteem lay out a ‘moral grammar’ of sorts2 where the denial, or withdrawal, of recognition is interpreted in relation to the legitimacy of social structures and experienced as a moral injury (Honneth, 1995: 162). Given that recognition is so constitutive of who we are, such experiences may have powerful social and personal consequences. In Taylor’s (1994: 25) words: [t]he thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. Such a claim, for instance, motivates social struggles for gender equality. Feminists argue that the inferiorisation of females and denigration of supposed feminine characteristics locks women and girls into a limiting selfunderstanding, which restricts their capacity to develop undistorted subjectivity and full autonomy in the world. In seeing social conflicts as compelled by feelings of humiliation, insult, contempt and disrespect, the recognition paradigm suggests that social conflicts, as opposed to being rooted in self-interest and the desire for competitive advantage, have decisively moral and normative contents framed by institutionalised regimes of recognition (Smith, 2010: 172). If the need for recognition is seen as an anthropological constant, it is important to emphasise that the types of social conflict and struggle it initiates are historically contingent. Claims for recognition in the political arena shift and change over time, just as the normative expectations and moral contents associated with patterns of recognition, too, shift and change. For Honneth, contemporary patterns of reciprocal recognition related to respect and social esteem are only possible in modern forms of social organisation, where subjects are detached from ‘concrete role expectations’ (1995: 109) that come along with an ascribed division of labour and a hierarchical distribution of social prestige and status. While traditional structures of recognition still afford individuals a sense of dignity and social esteem, the transition to modernity compelled an abstraction of the universal features of human subjects that decisively shaped ‘the form of reciprocity found in legal recognition’ (p. 109) and a pluralisation of the social horizons of value through which esteem can be determined and awarded (p. 122). In contrast to legal recognition in traditional societies, where rights and burdens are distributed according to social esteem based on social status (pp. 110–11), modern structures of

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legal recognition are formally grounded in a ‘universalist conception of morality’ in which ‘exceptions and privileges are no longer admissible’ (p. 109). Similarly, whereas in traditional societies the esteeming of particular qualities is framed by a hierarchically graded conception of honour mapped onto presumed social contribution and certain ways of life (p. 123), modern relations of esteem are based on a principle of individualised achievement wherein esteem is not judged in terms of ‘pre-ordained collective traits but capacities one develops throughout life’ (p. 125). What is significant in Honneth’s account is how these forms of reciprocal recognition lend themselves to continual expansion through social struggle. In laying out certain normative expectations, every institutionalised pattern of recognition has a ‘surplus of validity’ (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 151) that individuals and groups utilise to make claims for equal treatment or to ‘raise the value of the abilities associated with their way of life’ (p. 127). Honneth’s social theory of recognition thus not only provides a compelling account of the roots of social conflict and struggle, but also an explanation of how struggles for recognition operate as a productive and potentially progressive force in politics, opening new moral horizons and expanding the sphere of social justice. As the most developed account of the recognitiontheoretic paradigm, Honneth’s work has important political resonance for understanding the specific contours of identity/difference politics and multiculturalism. However, it is important to acknowledge that he does not explicitly orient his scholarship to these political concerns (Smith, 2010: 152). I would like to turn here to the work of Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser to better grasp the specific contours of identity-related struggles mounted under the banner of recognition of difference. Both are more concerned with the political-theoretical implications and normative prospects of such struggles. Like Honneth, Taylor and Fraser regard identity-based recognition struggles as potentially emancipatory, although Fraser is the least convinced of the three. Accordingly each seeks to understand what kind of politics are motivated by such struggles, in what political terms they may be justified and where their limits may reasonably be set. The finer details of these theories, and specific criticisms thereof, have been well documented elsewhere (e.g. Lash and Featherstone, 2001; Thompson, 2006; Owen and Tully, 2007; van den Brink and Owen, 2007; Schmidt am Busch and Zurn, 2010; O’Neill and Smith, 2012). For our purposes, what is pertinent to engage is how Taylor and Fraser approach the matter of difference in their respective accounts, and how they illustrate some of the tensions that emerge through the relationship between ‘misrecognition as a source of conflict’ and ‘recognition as remedy’ so pertinent to the postcolonial critique. Taylor’s (1994) essay ‘The politics of recognition’, which is widely considered to have heralded the development of the field (at least in the Anglo world; Honneth’s Kampf um Anerkennung (1992) would not be published in English until 1995), is an attempt to show how the political demands for the recognition of difference can be taken up within procedural liberalism. Similar

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to Honneth, Taylor connects the former to the historical development of an expressivist understanding of freedom, in which the ideal of authenticity – initially articulated by eighteenth-century Romanticist philosophers like JeanJacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder – has come to play a critical role in the ‘modern notion of identity’ (p. 38). As the idea that each individual has their own way of being human, and that this should be realised as opposed to conforming to a pre-existing model or outside pattern (Abbey, 2000: 86), the ideal of authenticity suggests that ‘living true to one’s originality’ (Taylor, 1991: 29) is necessary for freedom, respect and self-realisation and thus essential for the good life. Significantly, Taylor notes that the idea of originality as conceived of by Herder ‘is applied at two levels, not only to the individual person among other persons, but also to the culture bearing people among other peoples. Just like individuals, a Volk should be true to itself, that is, to its own culture’ (1994: 31). This suggests that cultures should not be forced to be anything other than what they are; that is, they should be allowed the freedom to pursue their own means, construct their own versions of the good and discover for themselves their own identity without any outside impetus. In this regard, the language of originality carries with it an implicit acceptance of difference and diversity (Taylor, 1991: 37). Something like the ideal of authenticity, Taylor suggests, is enshrined in the contemporary politics of difference. The claim that distinctness should be publicly recognised, if not fostered, would seem to come into conflict with the liberal proceduralist commitment to treat people with equal respect in a difference-blind fashion. On the one hand, the emphasis on distinctness appears to violate the principle of non-discrimination so essential to a liberal politics of equal respect. Proponents of the politics of difference, however, reproach the principle of equal treatment for negating ‘identity by forcing people into a homogenous mold that is untrue to them’; worse still, they charge the purported neutrality of the politics of equal dignity with being the ‘reflection of one hegemonic culture’ and thus, ‘in a subtle and unconscious way, itself highly discriminatory’ (p. 43). For Taylor, it is this last attack that is ‘the cruellest and most upsetting of all’, because it suggests that ‘the very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal’ (pp. 43–4). In engaging the ‘modern preoccupation with identity and recognition’ (p. 26), Taylor’s attempt to reconcile the politics of equal dignity with the politics of difference is primarily motivated by showing that the goal of cultural survivance in Quebec can be consistent with liberal principles. The politics of equal dignity and difference diverge quite significantly in their recommendations for the public sphere – the former seeks an ‘identical basket of rights and immunities’ while the latter seeks differential treatment. Nevertheless there is a universalist basis to the politics of difference, for it contends that ‘[e]veryone should be recognised for his or her unique identity’ (p. 38). This contention does not ask that ‘we give acknowledgement and status to something’ that is universally shared, but rather that ‘we give due acknowledgment to what is

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universally present – everyone has an identity – through recognising what is peculiar to each. The universal demand powers an acknowledgment of specificity’ (p. 39, my emphasis). It is thus the case that the politics of difference can be understood as an outgrowth of the politics of equal dignity, in ‘one of those shifts with which we are long familiar, where a new understanding of the human social condition imparts a radically new meaning to an old principle’. This is evident in the ways in which public manifestations of the politics of difference are typically compelled by denouncing discrimination and refusing second-class citizenship. For Taylor, then, both forms of politics can thus be understood as different manifestations of the same principle. From a liberal framework, recognising identity and cultural differences can be part of the core practice of respecting individuals. This is not to say, of course, that liberalism can or even should ‘claim complete cultural neutrality’; it is ‘also a fighting creed’ (p. 62). Nonetheless, Taylor’s argument is that there is scope within procedural liberalism to account for more substantive visions of the good life, which regard identity as a social good.3 If Taylor seeks to show that liberal societies can accommodate collective goals related to cultural survival and that liberal politics of equal respect can themselves be adapted to different cultural contexts without their liberal core being damaged (p. 60), Fraser is interested in developing a theory of justice that incorporates the emancipatory potential of recognition politics but does not place all its proverbial eggs in the identity basket. Wary of what she perceives as the psychologising implications of Honneth’s and Taylor’s respective understandings of the Hegelian problematic, which locate recognition in terms of healthy subjectivity and self-esteem rather than the ‘cultural-symbolic conditions of identity formation’ (Smith, 2010: 170), Fraser (2000) raises two central objections to an ‘identity model’ of recognition. The first is that its language of authenticity, ‘the need to elaborate and display an authentic, selfaffirming and self-generated collective identity’ (p. 112), lapses into a simplification and reification of group identities which not only obscures the complexities of human identification, but also the struggles for power and representation that necessarily take place within all groups. As such, the identity model risks encouraging ‘separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism and authoritarianism’ (p. 108) rather than the reciprocal regimes of recognition between equals it promises. The second objection Fraser leverages against the equation of the politics of recognition with identity politics is that it threatens to displace, if not supplant, a politics of redistribution concerned with economic inequality. This is problematic because of the massive expansion of wealth differentials across the globe4 and also because economic and cultural inequalities are intimately entangled with one another. In focusing on cultural depreciation, the identity model tends to attach misrecognition to ‘free-floating discourse’ rather than ‘institutionalised significations and norms’ (p. 110). It is the latter that allow us to illuminate more clearly the entanglement of identity with distributive injustice: the links between androcentric norms institutionalised in labour markets that ‘devalue

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activities coded as “feminine” and the lower wages of female workers’, for instance, or heterosexist norms in social welfare systems that deny ‘resources and benefits to gays and lesbians’. For Fraser, a fully formed theory of justice hence requires ‘both recognition and redistribution’ (1995: 69). To breach the divide between the two, often conceptualised as separate (Parekh, 2004: 199), she advocates a ‘dual perspective’ approach grounded in the notion of social status: From this perspective, what requires recognition is not group-specific identity but the status of individual group members as full partners in social interaction. Misrecognition, accordingly, does not mean the depreciation and deformation of group identity, but social subordination – in the sense of being prevented from participating as a peer in social life. (Fraser, 2000: 113) This principle of participatory parity affords Fraser a standard with which to adjudicate between different claims for recognition. Such adjudication is difficult if we were to subscribe completely to the self-esteem hypothesis, because it suggests that claims for recognition that boost the claimant’s selfesteem are justified, while those that decrease it are not. ‘On this hypothesis’, Fraser (2001: 32) writes, ‘racist identities would seem to merit some recognition, as they enable some poor [white people] to maintain their sense of selfworth by contrasting themselves with their supposed inferiors’. Similarly, without approaching recognition as a matter of social subordination, the politics of recognition risks buttressing exclusivist, limiting and divisive conceptions of identity. As much as claims for recognition are about the identity of the group in question, the status model reminds us that recognising group identity is not an end but a means to ‘equalise’ different groups’ social standing. Recognition, in this sense, is not a politics concerned with esteeming marginalised groups but rather one ‘aimed at overcoming subordination by establishing the misrecognised party as a full member of society, capable of participating on a par with other members’ (2001: 24). The principle of participatory parity also allows us to evaluate proposed remedies to injustice (2001: 33), which Fraser further divides into ‘affirmative’ and ‘transformative’ categories. Strategies for redistribution include affirmative remedies like the provision of welfare, whereas transformative strategies seek the transformation of the capitalist mode of production itself. The type of ‘social and cultural change’ required to rectify the injustice of misrecognition, too, can take place in either an affirmative or transformative manner, where the former would involve esteeming previously denigrated identities and the latter could include deconstructing or destabilising the terms of identity and shifting the focus towards the institutionalised patterns of social value that afford privileges to dominant social groups (Fraser, 2000: 115). Affirmative remedies would leave everyone’s identity more or less unchanged while recognition as deconstruction would ‘change everyone’s social identity’

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(Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 12–13). Fraser’s model allows for a range of possibilities, as the situation demands – providing, of course, that they address social subordination. Although she concedes that valorising group specificity may be a possible remedy to misrecognition, at times she indicates a preference for ‘deconstructivist’ approaches (1997; Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Taylor’s and Fraser’s respective accounts are quite indicative of the key debates in recognition theory. To this end, it is helpful to note that since publishing his essay, Taylor has not really developed his early contribution to the field while Fraser’s project is partially guided by a critique of what she regards as Taylor’s ‘culturalism’ (e.g. 1995). On the one hand, Fraser’s model can account for the number one challenge leveraged against political theories of recognition – in glossing over the ways in which ‘characterising the “identity” of a culture is itself a politically and ideologically charged issue’ (Rorty, 1994: 152), the politics of recognition promotes a vision of culture as homogenous, internally uniform and neatly bounded wholes (e.g. Appiah, 1994; Benhabib, 2002; Markell, 2004). Taylor’s use of the language of cultural authenticity has often been the main target in this challenge, for it seems to imply a certain stability and fixity to culture, which is dismissive of not just the diversity it is supposedly geared to acknowledge, but also betrays the vision of the autonomy on which it rests (e.g. Fierlbeck, 1996; Cooke, 1997; Seglow, 2003). While it is important to point out that Taylor does not regard authenticity as an ontological dimension of the self but rather a historically contingent moral ideal (Calhoun, 1991),5 Fraser’s framing of recognition in terms of participatory parity nonetheless seems to sidestep some of the more problematic implications that arise through his emphasis on authenticity as well as those of the commitment to ‘affirm’ difference. On the other hand, her focus on participatory parity as the fundamental principle of justice on which claims for recognition pivot loses much of the moral richness that informs both Honneth’s and Taylor’s accounts, which are much better able to elucidate the specific contours of moral injury and social suffering towards which contemporary struggles for the recognition of difference gesture (Smith, 2010: 161). For Fraser (2000: 113), distinctiveness and its affirmation play no special or constitutive role in recognition politics, the goal of which should be instead to constitute actors as full peers in social interaction. Identity and difference are not the ends but rather the means of justice, which raises the question of just how much her model can really capture the demand for the acknowledgement of culture as a social good and a matter of moral concern. Furthermore, if Fraser argues that the ideal of authenticity places an inordinate burden on members of marginalised groups to conform and ‘protect’ their particular identities, it is unclear how her preference for ‘transformative’ approaches to identity does not equally burden minorities with a particularly demanding commitment to deconstruct identity (Smith, 2010: 161–2). Likewise, there are very good reasons why people may want to preserve their identity and pass on their cultural traditions (Kompridis, 2007).

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While some scholars have suggested that Fraser’s model represents a ‘restricted’ notion of recognition in contrast to Honneth’s ‘general’ one (Owen and Tully, 2007: 268), others like Smith (2010: 171) have questioned whether Fraser should be considered within the recognition-theoretic paradigm at all, given her unwillingness to concede the normative significance of ‘experiences of misrecognition or the withdrawal of recognition’.

Recognition as ideology and the postcolonial critique The debates alluded to in juxtaposing Taylor and Fraser’s respective accounts are critically important to the postcolonial critique of recognition politics. It is important to note, however, that the recognition-theoretic paradigm has powerful resonance with many of postcolonial theory’s concerns, and is especially useful in buttressing many of the claims made by earlier anti-colonial theorists. The critique of colonial power is rendered even more powerful by recognition theory, for it demonstrates how colonialism as a relation of domination is fundamentally geared towards denying equal dignity and esteem for colonised peoples, wherein their non-recognition as equal human and moral subjects is entangled with their misrecognition as culturally and socially inferior to their colonisers. In highlighting how ‘indigenous and colonised peoples in general’ have been induced to internalise an image of their own inferiority (Taylor, 1994: 25), recognition theory is well poised to illuminate the psychological effects of colonialism, that is, how it distorts and damages the subjectivity of the colonised, as well as their relation to self and the world (Fanon, 1967). Furthermore, recognition theory can also provide an explanation for why colonised peoples were compelled to resist and struggle against colonialism rather than tacitly concede to their domination. It is likewise able to situate the anti-colonial claim that ‘European colonialism ought to be rolled back to give the peoples of what we now call the Third World their chance to be themselves unimpeded’ (Taylor, 1994: 31) within the development of a modern ideal of authenticity. This not only complicates conventional equations of modernity with the West but also lays out many of the core tenets on which anti-colonial struggles were based. The idea that culture is an important and legitimate terrain for justice buttresses the anticolonial claim that assimilation is unjust, not only because it deems the culture to-be-assimilated as less worthy but because genuine freedom, autonomy and equality cannot be realised within a system that enforces adherence to a dominant hegemon. In this regard, theoretical roadmaps to decolonisation laid out by anti-colonial figures like Fanon, Amil Cabral, Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh (see Kohn and McBride, 2011) resonate powerfully with a modern political theory of recognition, insofar as they locate the revaluing of cultural distinctiveness, such as traditions, belief systems and ways of life, as important for affording the colonised a sense of equal dignity and esteem. Most contemporary postcolonial theorists would not quibble with colonised and formerly colonised people’s need for cultural esteem, as laid out in

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the recognition paradigm, nor would they undercut the importance accorded to self-determination. What they do quibble with, however, is the touting in Western liberal societies of recognition as the remedy to cultural injustice, for the postcolonial challenge centres on the capacity of recognition politics to promote genuine freedom, autonomy and equality – genuine self-determination – for minorities and Indigenous peoples. In part, this is due to what are considered (in hegemonic postcolonial theory, at least) the divergences between anti-colonial and postcolonial scholarship on the question of culture. Whereas early anti-colonial scholarship has often been charged with nationalism and nativism, both considered continuations of colonial logic, contemporary postcolonial theory has dedicated itself to moving beyond binary thinking in a project of ‘cultural decolonisation.’ This is committed to an epistemological, methodological and pedagogical critique of the links between culture, power and knowledge (Pieterse and Parekh, 1995). Accordingly, postcolonial theorists have spent a great deal of time unsettling and disrupting any illusions of cultural fixity, cohesiveness or boundedness. As Edward Said (1993: 217) writes in Culture and Imperialism, ‘all cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic’. Despite common depictions of cultures as cohesive and bounded, ‘they actually assume far more “foreign” elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude’ (p. 15). The flipside here is once we accept that cultures are relational and cannot be understood without reference to a constitutive ‘outside’ (Hall, 1996: 4), it is necessary to acknowledge the extent to which supposedly fixed and distinct cultural boundaries are shaped by the concerns of power (Coronil, 1996: 73). Of these, the power relations produced by European colonialism are considered central, for postcolonial scholarship has highlighted the ways in which a belief in the absolute alterity of the colonised Other6 was ideologically necessary to justify and legitimise the colonial project (Said, 1978). Bhabha’s (1994) equally celebrated and criticised notion of ‘hybridity’ should be approached from this perspective. While cultural hybridity is in fact quite ordinary and deeply rooted throughout history (Pieterse, 2002: 24), it is critical to recognise that Bhabha’s account is motivated by the idea that a belief in the purity of culture promotes hierarchy and discourses of cultural superiority. The notion of hybridity, for Bhabha, is thus an interjection against Western modes of thought that approach the self as singular and difference as absolute. Such an approach to culture is by no means incompatible with the heralding of intersubjectivity in recognition theory. Indeed, the notion of hybridity is like the Meadian (1932: 164) insight that ‘no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between our own selves and others’, just writ somewhat larger and inserted into the peculiar imaginaries of colonialism. Nevertheless, the postcolonial approach to culture brings an additional dimension to the well-worn, if not somewhat tired, charge that the politics of recognition is ‘essentialist’ or ‘primordialist’ (e.g. Tempelman, 1999), insofar as its presumption that

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‘difference’ can be fixed enough to be recognised betrays its own dialogical premises in favour of a reification of group differences. Bhabha’s (2003: 163–4) engagement with the politics of recognition, which he frames in terms of a conflict between the right to culture and the writing of culture, is particularly instructive here. Focusing his attention on Taylor, Bhabha charges him with an inadvertent privileging of ‘whole’ cultures – that is, those characterised ‘by long, historical continuity’ like Quebec – that masks an inability to deal with the ‘partial milieux’ of migrant and minoritarian cultures (p. 166). Such cultures are dislocated across time and space, inchoate and porous, invariably positioned somewhere between the home of old and the home of new. For Bhabha, ‘demands for “minority” representation and recognition – be it race, class, gender, generation – are [hence] made from a perspective that is intercultural’ (p. 175), and it is this interculturality that eclipsed the vision of culture implicit in recognition theory. The politics of recognition’s ‘prescription that minorities should preserve cultural identity rather than emerge in new cultural formations’ (p. 168) not only evinces the possibility of tokenism and essentialism, but may in fact mean that it misses much about the ‘messy reality of cultural diversity’ in contemporary societies (Mookherjee, 2010: 182). Bhabha is not against recognition per se. His purpose is to ask whether ‘the culture of rights and the writing of culture can be made to converse with each other’ (p. 164). Taylor (2003), for his part, maintains that Bhabha has misread the use to which he put the term ‘partial milieux’.7 Bhabha’s point, however, is not just that the politics of recognition misses something important about the production of cultural difference and the inevitable impurity of ‘culture’ as we understand it, or that it is ‘essentialist’ in its recommendations. Instead, he invites us to reflect on whether a liberal politics of recognition is implicated in reproducing existing power relations, fashioning the political subjectivities of minorities in ways that align with Western structures of subject-constitution and promoting identification with the neo-colonial state (Mookherjee, 2010: 185). Spivak elucidates this concern in slightly different terms. Like Bhabha, she concedes – albeit warily and wearily – the necessity of such a politics: liberal rights are that which the oppressed ‘cannot not want’ (1993: 101) and her concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ (1987: 205) grants the importance of identity claims serving ‘scrupulously visible political interest’.8 Spivak remains cautious of the representational violence involved in the flattening of specificity that accompanies abstract struggles for recognition. However, she is especially wary of what she sees as a preoccupation with difference in liberal pluralism and leftist identity politics, which she charges with promoting a ‘specular alterity’ (2003: 81) that renders ‘otherness both palatable and intelligible within Western organisations of agency and meaning’ (Waggoner, 2005: 132). The professed commitment to difference in the politics of recognition is thus but a mere smokescreen, for instead of facilitating the flourishing of minority particularity it promotes affinity with Western modes of organising identity and difference.

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This is a hefty charge for a paradigm which not only takes seriously the social importance of cultural difference but is committed to political models of justice that can better account for societal plurality and diversity. In accusing the politics of recognition of complicity in reproducing Western hegemony, particularly the supposed visions of culture and cultural difference it constitutes and of which it is constitutive, the postcolonial critique submits that recognition is an ideological ruse because it ‘invokes the common good to legitimate a particular order in which the interests of some are privileged over those of others’ (Schaap, 2008: 249). As I have already noted, the critique of recognition as ideology is not exclusive to postcolonial scholars. Instead, it may be thought in terms of a wider poststructuralist challenge pessimistic about the emancipatory potential of mutual recognition in general and drawing on a French critical tradition represented by theorists like Jean Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas and Louis Althusser. The latter’s concept of interpellation, in particular, forms the crux of this critique. Understanding interpellation as the process whereby we are ‘hailed’ by power to a specific place in the symbolic order and constituted as subjects, Althusser (1971) regards recognition as the ideological mechanism through which the state produces obedient subjects, that is, those who will ‘turn’ to answer the call of recognition and in so doing subjugate themselves to the law (p. 163). As opposed to effecting moral progress towards more just relations of mutual recognition, recognition is charged with an inherent conservatism that enforces assimilation and conformism to existing social norms and values. In Sartre (1969), for instance, the desire for recognition merely binds one to already existing socially mandated regimes of recognition and fundamentally eschews the cause of human freedom – developing a relation to self that is not one of full subjectivity, but rather happens to align with the dominant order. The key claim here is that relations of recognition are also relations of power (van den Brink and Owen, 2007). However appealing to the ideal of reciprocal recognition, critics maintain that its promise of equality and freedom is always tempered by inequalities of power. Arguments against recognition theory suggest that it does not seriously engage the implications of this for how recognition is doled out, particularly in terms of statebased institutionalised regimes of recognition (Markell, 2004) or, conversely, that it does not pay enough heed to how subjects, and the differences for which they seek recognition, are constructed in and through power relations (McNay, 2008).9 These concerns are heftier still in colonial contexts, for colonialism legislates starkly asymmetrical power differentials and is shaped by a structurally inherent non-reciprocity in relations between coloniser and colonised. Fanon illuminates this in Black Skin, White Masks (1967), in which he critiques the limited ‘generative power’ (Coronil, 1996: 60) of the Hegelian ideal of mutual recognition as it leaves the confines of Europe and enters the colonial context. This insight has come to be paradigmatic in the postcolonial critique of recognition (e.g. Oliver, 2001; Schaap, 2004). As a Martinican who fought for

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the French in the latter stages of World War Two and an anti-colonial writer who joined the Algerian freedom fighters in their independence struggle against French colonisation, Fanon is an iconic figure in the endeavour to challenge and displace the structures of colonialism and imperialism. Deeply sceptical of Hegel’s heralding of absolute reciprocity in the master–slave dialectic wherein ‘subjects recognise themselves as mutually recognising each other’ (1967: 169), Fanon argues that this account simply cannot hold as it transgresses the abstracted face-to-face encounter into actual conditions of slavery. Contrary to Hegel, Fanon argues there is no scope for mutual recognition in the master–slave relation, for ‘the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work’ (1967: 172, fn 8, my emphasis). In Hegel’s extended account of the dialectic, the slave can gain some form of independence and ‘liberation’ by turning away from the master and towards his labour. This too, Fanon asserts, is nothing like the actual relations of slavery, for here the ‘Negro wants to be like his master … In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns towards the object. Here the slave turns towards the master and abandons the object.’ Here Fanon’s wariness towards the possibilities of reciprocal recognition in colonial contexts becomes most apparent. Colonised peoples are characterised by an internalised belief in their own inferiority, and as such are embroiled in relations of dependency with their colonisers. ‘The Negro is comparison’ (p. 211), Fanon writes: ‘[t]he black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level’ (p. 3). Mutual recognition in such conditions is hence impossible, for the coloniser occupies a position of superiority heeded by himself and internalised by the other. Glen Coulthard’s (2007) adoption of the Fanonian critique helpfully brings Fanon within the orbit of contemporary liberal theories of recognition. Fanon reminds us, Coulthard argues, first, that the terms of recognition in conditions of deep social inequality are invariably set by the dominant and the subaltern seeking recognition must work within these terms – the possibilities for human freedom and equality, in such a context, are naturally limited (p. 443). These limitations are missed in Taylor’s account, which, in its appropriation of the face-to-face Hegelian dialectic, neglects that ‘there is no mutual dependency’ in large-scale, state-mediated exchanges of recognition. ‘The colonial state and society’ does not need recognition from its colonised populations, only ‘land, labour and resources’, and will offer recognition only if that does not throw into question ‘the legal, political and economic framework of colonial relationship itself ’ (p. 451). Second, Coulthard adds, in underscoring the psycho-affective dimensions of the colonial relationship, Fanon locates the internalisation of the colonial relationship in the colonised’s subjectivity as a critical site of struggle – colonialism ensures its hegemony over time by the ‘interplay between structural/objective and recognitive/ subjective realms’ (Coulthard, 2007: 444). Further, as much as Fraser’s notion of participatory parity accounts for the former realm (in a way that Taylor’s does not), it is decisively ill-equipped to deal with the psychological aspects

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produced by colonialism’s oppression of the colonised (pp. 447–8). Speaking in the context of Canada’s First Nations, Coulthard’s prognosis for the liberal politics of recognition is thus dire. Although it is a clear improvement over genocide, assimilation and exclusion, he fears that the politics of recognition does not have the resources to transform the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the colonial state, and in fact is ‘complicit in the colonial relations of power that Indigenous claims for recognition have historically sought to transcend’ (p. 439). Instead of investing the desire for freedom and equality in reciprocal regimes of recognition between coloniser and colonised, the latter ‘must struggle to critically reclaim and revaluate the worth of their own histories, traditions, and cultures against the subjectifying gaze and assimilative lure of colonial recognition’ (p. 454). This critique is a powerful reminder that as much as practices of recognition respond to unequal relations of power – insofar as they are attuned to the social experience of humiliation, insult or disrespect – they should not be held in opposition to subjugation or domination but instead be treated as implicated in reproducing power inequalities (Honneth, 2012: 76–7). Given the ideological and epistemological legacies of European colonialism in contemporary modalities of organising culture and cultural difference, as well as the slippery, albeit sticky, persistence of Western cultural, political and social hegemony in the postcolonial era, such a reminder is also prudent. If Bhabha and Spivak allow for the possibility of some form of recognition politics, Coulthard’s answer to the question of whether recognition is a helpful or even appropriate paradigm within which minority groups and Indigenous peoples should mount their struggles is a resounding ‘no’. Can the paradigm survive the critique of recognition as ideology? Honneth (2012) advocates an important defence of the critical potential of the recognition-theoretic paradigm, while conceding the ideological critique’s value. For Honneth, it is significant to engage how the ideological critique nevertheless works off an implicit juxtaposition with ‘good’, morally justified forms of recognition. This distinction, he suggests, is not only available to us retrospectively, relying as it does on an evaluative moral horizon that is of necessity historically and temporally located (pp. 77–8), but is arguably far more complicated than initially granted. To convince subjects to willingly submit to the dominant social order, ideological forms of recognition cannot contribute to excluding their addressees or narrow their circles of autonomy, but must be positive and credible and ultimately ‘contribute to their integration’ (p. 86). Honneth continues: ‘In contrast to [exclusionary] ideologies that … virtually shatter the evaluative perceptual horizon of the present by blinding individual groups to the evaluative qualities of others, ideological forms of recognition operate within an historical “space of reasons”’ (p. 88), where they must credibly appeal to subjects enough to be taken on. That is, they must make sense within existing horizons of value. If we further acknowledge that such forms of recognition ‘cannot avoid making semantic use of the principles of love, legal equality or achievement which shape the given conditions of

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reciprocal recognition’, then the line between ideological and non-ideological becomes more blurred. Recalling that Honneth regards struggles for recognition as making for the continual broadening of our evaluative horizon, with each struggle laying the ground for new ones to emerge and apply or reappropriate general principles, his question to us is: ‘who can tell us for sure that an apparently functional, ideological evaluation is not just one of those shifts in accentuation by means of which the struggle for recognition unfolds historically?’ (p. 89).10 Only when such forms of recognition are flatly refused can we be sure of their ideological character; otherwise, if ‘individuals seem to gain a new sense of self-respect’ then what is ideological and what is justified is unclear. Honneth should give us pause for thought that the recognition-theoretic paradigm cannot account for such a critique. What I want to ask is whether recognition is redeemable from a postcolonial perspective, by which I mean to what extent a politics of recognition can be considered consonant with postcolonial aims and insights. If the idea of ‘misrecognition as a source of conflict’ is accepted as an anthropological constant in postcolonial theory, the challenge here is how to reconfigure ‘recognition as a remedy’. My point is not to propose political prescriptions, suffice to say that there is no inherent reason why a project of ‘turning inwards’ like Coulthard’s could not be conducted in conjunction with, or alongside, more conventional approaches to recognition that demand rights from the state or cultural recognition from dominant society. Rather, I want to ask whether exploring the relationship between the experience of misrecognition and the demand for recognition may allow us to imagine what minorities ask for when they claim recognition, and hence recognition as remedy, in a different way. To this end, Fanon deserves a closer reading.

Fanon’s recognition Despite criticising Hegel’s ideal of reciprocal recognition as articulated through the master–slave dialectic, Fanon’s work importantly remains, to a significant extent, invested in the Hegelian paradigm (Turner, 1996: 145). Indeed, it is in these terms that his endorsement of revolutionary violence – however problematic this may be in retrospect – must be understood. For Fanon, reciprocal recognition of the type laid out by Hegel cannot be achieved without struggle and conflict (that is, the willingness to risk death as per the primitive struggle for recognition). In colonial settings, the power differentials between coloniser and colonised are so great that a simple withdrawal of colonial power will not win the colonised their freedom and independence, an argument he makes in Black Skin, White Masks (1967: 171–3) by juxtaposing the emancipation of black slaves in France with those in the United States. Whereas ‘the American Negro … battles and is battled’, the French Negro was granted his freedom by ‘the white man, in the capacity of master’ – as such he ‘knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not

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fought for it (p. 172). Worse still, he remains caught in a relation of dependency on the master, where he may fight time to time ‘for Liberty and Justice, but these [are] always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters’. Fanon sees violent revolution as playing an important role as a type of collective catharsis for colonised peoples, allowing themselves to break free of the cycle of psychological dependency on the colonial relationship and rid themselves of their ingrained sense of inferiority.11 If, and only if, the slave uprises and fights for the position of master (and is not simply granted it by the reigning master) can he approach genuine freedom and self-determination. Fanon, however, does not seek a reversal of positions – ‘when there are no longer slaves, there are no longer masters’ (p. 171). Struggle and conflict paves the way for a new order which would equalise the power relations that stand in the way of genuine reciprocal recognition, thus liberating both colonised and coloniser (Bernasconi, 1996: 121; Ahluwalia, 2003: 346). This is precisely what is so tragic about the situation of the French Negro as Fanon details it, for ‘unable ever to be sure whether the white man considers his consciousnessin-itself-for-itself, he must forever absorb himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge’ (p. 173). In other words, he is trapped within a reactionary stance – ‘and there is always resentment in a reaction’. It denies him the possibility to be ‘actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world’. The new order Fanon thus desires is a humanism that does not just pay lip service to the category of the human by deeming some more human than others, but, through affirming the fundamental equality of all peoples, allows ‘all men to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world’ (p. 181). Such an idea forms the background of Fanon’s reflections on mis/recognition. Let us engage what is quite rightfully one of his most famous chapters in Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon takes us through the gut-wrenching experience of misrecognition and the concomitant desire for recognition it arouses. We begin with Fanon on a train in France, where his aspiration to ‘be a man among men’ (p. 85) in the white world is torn away by the fact of his blackness: ‘Look a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. ‘Look a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me. ‘Look a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’ Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. (p. 84)

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Here, Fanon’s ‘corporeal schema’ crumbles and is replaced by a ‘racial epidermal schema’: I was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’’. (pp. 84–5) He continues: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (p. 86) In defiance of the white world that ‘burns’ him, Fanon abandons his original aspiration and decides to assert himself ‘as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognise me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known’ (p. 87). As such, he seeks to locate his liberation in a reversal of white stereotypes, to locate in black civilisation a wholeness and superiority that robs ‘the white man of a “certain world”’ (p. 97). Alas, this, too, appears to be a losing proposition. In talking to a white friend, recognition seems to be afoot: The soul of the white man was corrupted … ‘The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel they have become too mechanised, they turn to the men of colour and ask them for a little human sustenance.’ (p. 98) Upon being told this Fanon felt that ‘at last [he] had been recognised, [he] was no longer as zero’. However, this initial moment of satisfaction was soon eclipsed: Only momentarily at a loss, the white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development: ‘Your properties have been exhausted by us. We have had earth mystics such as you will never approach. Study our history and you will see how far this fusion has gone.’ (p. 98)

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The early promise of recognition is thus destroyed ‘by a galaxy of corrosive stereotypes’ (p. 99). His originality is once again torn from him, and he becomes again merely comparison. In every instance, Fanon goes on to argue, ‘the whites had thrown themselves on me and hamstrung me’ (p. 99), reminding him that ‘it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me’ (p. 102). ‘Every hand was a losing hand for me … I wanted to be typically Negro – it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white – that was a joke’ (p. 101). In the end, watching as ‘the sky turn[s] upon itself utterly and wholly’ (p. 108), the only thing he can do is sit and weep. I have detailed Fanon’s argument at some length here, because he elucidates so exquisitely the psycho-affective experience of misrecognition as well as the seeming hopelessness of the desire to be recognised within colonial relations of domination. Significantly, it also helps us to make sense of the urgency with which he advocates for violent revolution, for the quicker we do away with the colonial relationship the quicker we can begin to remake meaning for ourselves and the world more broadly. By no means do I intend to approve of his call for violence, and from our current historical vantage point there is a certain naiveté to his account – if only it were that easy to ‘undo’ colonialism! What interests me, however, is the normative vision that underlines Fanon’s endorsement of violent anti-colonial struggle. It is guided by what Ghassan Hage (2010) calls an ‘aspiration to the universal’ (p. 115), which shapes the particular way in which Fanon as an individual subject experiences misrecognition and the normative responses he imagines to be appropriate in response to it. Hage relates this aspiration to Fanon’s particular standing as a cosmopolitan subject with a certain amount of cultural and economic capital. Black Skin, White Masks is significantly informed by the difficulties he encounters as a highly educated Martinican man entering France to discover that he is not as French as he once believed himself to be.12 However, Hage suggests that, if the general experience of racialised people is that they fluctuate between ‘a desire for particularity’ (where they are recognised for their difference) and ‘a desire for universality’ (that is, to be treated like everyone else), what is striking is that for Fanon, his ejection from the human is the most hurtful, making the universal a seeming ‘obsession’ (p. 119). If ‘the reduction of racism to a denial of universality … is itself particular to the Fanonian experience’, then, so is the framing of the ‘pursuit of particularity and the pursuit of universality’ as ‘an either/or choice’ (p. 117). According to Hage, Fanon’s desire for a new humanism is connected to his own disavowal of his ‘vacillation’ as a racialised subject and unwillingness to recognise that the ‘choice’ between universality and particularity is typically framed by the amount of economic and cultural capital one has (pp. 117–18; see also Robinson, 1993: 80). Taken in these terms, Fanon’s recognition is as suspiciously ideological as those forms critiqued by postcolonial scholars. Hage makes some interesting points about the psycho-affective dynamics of identification, which I will consider in detail in Chapter 4. For now, however,

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I refer to Hage because his argument – perhaps somewhat paradoxically – serves to illuminate what I see as Fanon’s most helpful insights when it comes to interpreting minority struggles for recognition in contemporary Western contexts. Fanon is apprehensive towards the ‘particularist and essentialist tendencies’ (Hage, 2010: 114) of identity-based movements. Much of his anger in the passages detailed above is directed towards négritude (the affirmation of black identity), which he believes ‘rests on a simple reversal, a re-appropriation of white stereotypes of black culture’ (Kruks, 1996: 130). Nevertheless, Fanon also acknowledges that movements like négritude are necessary to instil a sense of pride and empowerment in the colonised and overcome the relations of misrecognition embedded in colonial domination.13 The inferiority complex suffered by colonised peoples is not just to do with their ejection from the human, but also ‘the death and burial of [their] local cultural originality (p. 9). Accordingly, Fanon vests a great deal of importance in the self-recovery of cultural traditions so that colonised peoples can identify themselves as distinct and important contributors to humanity (Coulthard, 2007: 454) – even as he concedes that the national culture project is ripe for manipulation by bourgeois nationalist elites (1965: 167–89).14 The point, for Fanon, is thus not a simple affirmation or desire for particularity, but rather to develop a living, ongoing project in which colonised peoples (re)discover their particularity anew, ‘with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’ (1965: 187). Equally, Hage argues that while Fanon’s vision of new humanism is often celebrated as representative of an ‘alter’, or actional, politics (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2000), his investment in the desire for universality as ‘a particular affective and ambivalent mode of reacting to the colonial/racist dimensions of European modernity’ (p. 114) means that he is nevertheless fixated on these terms even as he seeks to go beyond them. Yet, if Fanon is not obsessed with the universal in the way that Hage charges him with – and I submit that he is not – then the question is how does he imagine the new order to come? He is well aware of the fact that white culture is a false universal: ‘I wanted to be white – that was a joke’ (p. 101). Nor does he seek to replace that with a black civilisation. Instead, the key for Fanon is participation in meaning making; that is, the ability to make meaning for one’s self, as opposed to having meaning imposed. Fanon is under no illusions that there is a position ‘outside’ of colonialism – or, indeed, outside of the social relations that constitute us as subjects – but what he seeks is the moral horizons in which he can interject into those social relations, and help to shape them: it is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinise the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world … Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You? (p. 181)

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Whereas Hage speaks of a ‘vacillation’ between the universal and the particular, which he frames in terms of a desire for contradictory things (p. 117), Fanon suggests in contrast that the two are not contradictory per se, but rather constitutive of each other. Extracting the universal from the particular and vice versa is hard, ultimately artificial work, for misrecognition takes place through a simultaneous experience of rejection from a general category and denigration of particularity. Recognition as remedy is simultaneously targeted at both. In this sense, Fanon invites us to consider Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies from an enlarged perspective – could it be that affirmative remedies work to transform common horizons of social value and could transformative remedies open the space for affirmation of certain particularities?

Conclusion Fanon’s understanding of recognition, and the visions of human freedom and equality it entails, affords us an interpretive bridge with which to bring the insights of postcolonial theory and the recognition paradigm into fruitful conversation. Fanon’s recognition highlights the significance of political identity in recognition struggles, wherein affirming difference is positioned in relation to a vision of the type of world we aspire to share with each other – something that Taylor (2003) points out in his response to Bhabha. For Bhabha (1994: xx), claims for recognition are ultimately about the ‘right to narrate’, that is, the right to interject, challenge and transform the myths of belonging and cultural homogeneity that almost always lead to exclusionary outcomes. He explains further: narrative is not simply a social value; it is a moving sign of civic life. Those societies that turn their back on the right to narrative are societies of deafening silence … The right to narrate assumes that there is a commitment to creating ‘spaces’ of cultural and regional diversity, for it is only by acknowledging such resources as a ‘common good’ that we can ensure our democracy is based on dialogue and conversation, difficult though it may be, between uneven and unequal levels of development and privilege that exist in complex societies. (Taylor, 2003: 181) While he and Taylor appear to disagree on the role of the state in recognition struggles – ‘states’, for Taylor, ‘are important because they are still major loci of what fragile democratic control we have’ (2003: 186) – they agree about the significance of the right to narrate. If states are to be loci of democracy, Taylor suggests that: they have to recognise their multiple, and in some cases even multinational, nature. This means that they have to weigh less heavily on the

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Thinking struggles for recognition through political identity adds an additional dimension to Bhabha’s assertion that minority struggles for recognition are ‘intercultural’. For while he seems to be pointing to the conditions of migration, it is also evident that minorities are embroiled in relations with hegemonic societal cultures that they may reject or accept, but in any case will engage and appraise. Fanon’s recognition may not offer us a political roadmap for the forms recognition can and may take. He does offer though a mode of interpreting recognition struggles that does not see them as necessarily fixing particularity into Western modes of meaning as Bhabha and Spivak worry about, nor the enfolding of minorities into dominant power relations as Coulthard cautions us against. If, like the quote from Bauman (2001: 148) in the epigraph reminds us, demands for recognition do not seem to be going anywhere, there is an important need to engage, and seek to build upon, their most emancipatory potentialities. Seeing the claim for recognition as intimately entangled with the right to narrate allows an enlarged perspective on the type of work that recognition struggles aim to do in wider society, without seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable or disavow contradiction as a postcolonial methodology demands (Spivak, 2003). Through Fanon, we can see how claims for recognition are bound up in, and seek to transform, the social relations that make recognition such a vital need in the first place. If we are to apply this insight to immigrant and Indigenous struggles for recognition in the West, however, there are a couple of questions that remain outstanding. First, Fanon foregrounds the struggle for recognition in terms of a dialectical relationship between the universal and the particular. How are we to theoretically grasp such a relationship? This is important because it allows us to consider how, and to what extent, the universal is amenable to rearticulation through political struggle. Second, the universal political identity Fanon engages is that of the ‘human’. To what extent can the same insight hold if we are to turn it to the question of nation? It is with these two questions in mind that we will enter into Chapter 4.

Notes 1 The slave’s perspective is another dimension of the master–slave dialectic. For Hegel, the self-consciousness of the slave is more complex than that of the master, and potentially more liberating, because the slave can achieve partial self-consciousness

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3

4 5

6

7

8 9

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11 12 13

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through their labour, which turns them from a thing or an object to a subject who shapes material nature. For Honneth (1995), those associated with love ‘cannot be generalised beyond the circle of primary relationships, at least not in a way that would make them matters of public concern’ because intimate relationships do not lend themselves to socially generalisable criteria (p. 162). A feminist analysis, however, might take issue with this seemingly firm distinction between the public and private realms. On this point, it is worth noting that Taylor has been criticised for a particularly narrow conception of procedural liberalism, which contrasts with the richness of accounts laid out by procedural liberals like Jürgen Habermas (see Habermas, 1994). As Fraser argues in her exchange with Honneth in Redistribution or Recognition? (2003), it is questionable whether injustices related to capitalism can be understood in terms of an ideal of reciprocal recognition. Taylor (1989: 384) readily acknowledges that the ideal of authenticity rests on unclear and problematic foundations. However, he also argues that it is not inherently against the idea of dialogical recognition. The imperative towards authenticity places us in a position of relying even more heavily on the recognition of others, and therefore does not foreclose on the premise that we can only work out our ‘authentic self ’ in a dialogical regime of recognition with others (Smith, 2002: 154; also Taylor, 1991: 45, 49). It is important to acknowledge that the interpretation of alterity along the lines of culture is a relatively new historical development. The concept of culture has its own ideological history and is a relatively recent creation in designating otherness, only emerging in the 20th century with the Western discipline of anthropology (McGrane, 1989). Previously, horizons of difference (from a Western perspective) have been organised along a variety of other categories: within the Renaissance as Christianity, the Enlightenment as Reason and the 19th century on the hierarchy of race. Taylor (2003: 184–5) clarifies that by ‘partial milieux’ he was not arguing for a hierarchy between parts and wholes, but making the ‘anodyne point that the residence of certain qualities in a whole doesn’t argue its existence in each of its parts, although it must evidently exist in some’; this is based on the larger presumption that all human cultures have something to offer us. Spivak has since disavowed the term but not the idea, lamenting that the ‘strategic’ is all too often dropped from popular appropriations of the concept (Danius et al., 1993). In exploring how recognition can function as a mechanism of domination, several theorists have proposed alternative politics they intend to circumvent some of the problematic implications of the recognition-theoretic paradigm as it is conventionally laid out, such as ‘witnessing’ (Oliver, 2001) and ‘acknowledgement’ (Markell, 2004). While Honneth’s contention that recognition regimes are shaped by their surrounding socio-cultural circumstances may seem inherently conservative, his model of historical development through recognition does not foreclose on the radical reappropriation of general principles. Fanon the psychiatrist is well aware of the mental disorders that arise through violent struggles for national liberation; see The Wretched of the Earth (1967: 200–50). Interestingly, much like many educated migrant minorities in the contemporary West, Fanon rallies against encountering the constant presumption that he cannot speak French well, or at all (esp. pp. 8–27). It is on this point that Fanon makes one of his most weighty criticisms of Sartre. In Black Orpheus (1988) Sartre claims négritude as a transitory phenomenon. While Fanon largely agrees with Sartre, he argues that he nevertheless takes away

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the zeal and power from the movement. In doing so, Fanon claims that ‘Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man’ (1967: 138). 14 Fanon’s account of the development of national consciousness and national culture in The Wretched of the Earth (1965) is a good example of what Spivak means by ‘strategic essentialism’. While he is wary of its appropriation by nationalist bourgeois concerns, he consistently brings this project back to the ‘authenticity’ of peasant traditions. This serves as an important anchor with which to critique both manipulation and the pitfalls of cultural essentialism.

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4

Contingent universals and shifting particulars Reorienting recognition struggles

Do we always know whether a claim is particular or universal, and what happens when the semantics of the claim, governed by political context, renders the distinction undecidable? (Judith Butler, in Butler et al., 2000: 33)

In Chapter 3 I argued that the politics of recognition has substantial theoretical and analytical value from a postcolonial perspective, insofar as foregrounding the constitutive relationship between experiences of misrecognition and the claim for recognition leads us to approach the affirmation of difference as entangled with the reconfiguration of political identity. This chapter is dedicated to further developing this argument, focusing on a couple of basic presumptions which have not been fully engaged with as yet. First is the question of how we can theorise the relationship between universal and particular. Whereas it is perhaps now an academic truism to assert that these are constitutive of each other, what this means for fully comprehending the dynamics of struggles for the recognition of difference, and the alternative modes of interpretation it promises, remain decidedly underexplored in both postcolonial and multicultural scholarship. Second is how we can imagine the universal as amenable to contestation and rearticulation through struggle. Honneth’s (1995) paradigmatic theory of recognition goes some way in exploring how shared moral horizons open up and expand through social struggle and conflict related to the experience of misrecognition and the concomitant demand to be ‘recognised’. The role of power, however, plays a lesser role in Honneth’s work, even as he has sought to rectify this in more recent scholarship (e.g. 2012). Given the critical import of power in postcolonial thinking, this chapter approaches universality and the dialectic of particular-universal through the prism of power relations, specifically the notion of hegemonic struggle. As I want to argue, one of the key benefits of bringing the universal into the analysis of the politics of difference is precisely that it allows us to explore how claims for recognition may be engaged in the struggle for hegemony, or at the very least have counter-hegemonic potential as an articulatory practice. To this end, the chapter offers a reading of Judith Butler’s (Butler et al., 2000) Hegelian account of universality as a site of hegemonic contestation.

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For Butler, the dialectical relationship between universal and particular means that what is considered universal at any given time is always and necessarily subject to contest and revision. Underscoring the ways in which proclamations to universality are inevitably partial and permanently haunted by their excluded particularities, Butler submits that political claims for recognition can be expressed in the service of both particularity and universality. Specifically, she suggests that in seeking to hold hegemonically dominant notions of the universal to account for the exclusions on which they are premised, difference-related claims very often posit their own ‘competing universalism’ – and as such enter into the struggle for hegemony. Such an approach helps us to make additional sense of Fanon’s aspiration for a ‘new humanism’ considered in Chapter 2. Here, I want to ground Butler’s notion of competing universalisms with reference to a different type of recognition struggle: namely, the struggle to render feminism more cognisant and acknowledging of women’s differences, particularly those related to culture, race and nationality. Feminism in general offers a particularly illuminating terrain on which to explore the potentials and pitfalls of recognition politics. As Honneth asserts, feminist works ‘often lead in a direction that intersects with the aims of a theory of recognition’ (1995: 2). Debates over self, culture and identity that have been the object of feminist criticism and theory since the late 1970s and early 1980s prefigured in many ways those that have only recently come to the fore of recognition theory. Furthermore, feminism addresses the same core issues of inequality and oppression, according another route to think about how inequality and oppression arise from a failure to treat people equally that ‘seems to be bound up in some way with an inability to accept difference’ (Phillips, 2010: 21). My specific focus is how postcolonial feminists express this demand for recognition. Like postcolonialism itself, ‘postcolonial feminism’ is a contested term and by no means unequivocally endorsed by all theorists who might be considered under its rubric. I understand postcolonial feminism in terms of how colonialism and neo-colonialism intersect with race, gender, sexuality, nation, class and culture in shaping women’s lives, subjectivities and experiences (Sunder Rajan and Park, 2005: 53). Postcolonial feminist work has done much to highlight gender as an abiding dynamic of imperial and colonial power (e.g. McClintock, 1995; Stoler, 2002), and is in many ways defined by its challenge to mainstream postcolonialism – largely dominated by men, with the exception of Spivak – to engage with the work of female writers and issues of female agency (Lewis and Mills, 2003: 2). Most relevant to this chapter, however, is the critique made by postcolonial feminists, along with black, women of colour and queer feminists, against mainstream feminism for falsely universalising the experiences of white, Western women at the expense of genuinely attending to diversities beyond the singular dimension of sexual difference. While this critique is often read as purely in the service of particularity, I suggest that it is in fact far more nuanced. In pointing to the complexities of cultural exchange and formation in conditions of (neo-)colonialism,

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postcolonial feminists neither seek for ‘Western’ feminism to include ‘Third World’ differences nor do they assert a ‘Third World feminism’ as an alternative (Mohanty, 1991). Instead, they express their claims in a way that powerfully resonates with Butler’s conception of competing universalisms. Recognition of difference, in this regard, involves exposing the false premises of the existing universal and articulating a competing vision that better heeds their particular differences. Finally, the chapter moves from the ‘imagined community’ of feminism to that of nation, in order to engage how the notion of competing universalisms might be illuminating in the context of multicultural struggles for the recognition of difference. I am making somewhat of a theoretical jump here. For all its differences, feminism is articulated in the name of a loosely knit and effectively voluntary political community, with similar concerns (the unequal status of women) and goals (female emancipation). The nation, in contrast, is made up of individuals and groups with varying political affiliations, political goals, conceptions of the common good, visions of the good life and so on; it also has something of an involuntariness to it, where we are either born into it, move into it or have it imposed on us. Furthermore, whereas we can take ‘woman’ – the stuff of feminist politics – to be a universal signifier of sorts it is not immediately apparent that ‘nation’ counts as a universal. While there is a universalist aspect to the ideology of nationalism wherein we all have a nation, nation, if anything, seems to be ‘the chief representative of particularity’, as Michael Walzer (1989: 536) puts it. Not only is the development of nationalism widely regarded as a response to the Enlightenment project of universalism (Jusdanis, 2001), but also the very definition of nation as an imagined community is that it is limited. As Benedict Anderson (1991: 16) writes, ‘no nation imagines itself as coterminous with humankind’ and if it does, this immediately and quite justifiably brings to mind imperialist expansion and colonial domination (think, for instance, of the United States’ mission to bring freedom and democracy to the world or France’s colonial goal to render its colonies culturally French). Acknowledging these conceptual difficulties, I follow Etienne Balibar’s (2002) formulation of nation as a universal. In part, he suggests that the nation may be considered a mechanism of universality because as a structure of hegemonic domination it masks its own ‘peculiarity’ and ‘one-sidedness’ through a legitimising discourse of representing the general will. More to the point, he argues that as much as a totality seen from the outside can ‘appear highly particularistic’, the nation nevertheless represents a schema wherein particularities are attached to and produced by a broader set of ‘universal’ prescriptions. ‘Such a structure,’ he stresses, ‘always exists when a secondorder community … is raised above “traditional” or “natural” or “primary” memberships … that is, whenever immediate memberships are virtually deconstructed and re-constructed as organic parts of the whole’ (p. 160). In making the case for approaching multicultural struggles for recognition within a discursive economy of competing universalisms, I engage Ghassan Hage’s

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(1998, 2008, 2010) work on multiculturalism and nationalism in Australia. Hage is particularly useful because his primary focus is how the construction of the prototypical ‘national’ conditions and structures of national belonging solidifies the hegemonic dominance of some groups and the subordination of others. As much as Hage is pessimistic about the counter-hegemonic possibilities of invoking nation, I suggest that he nevertheless affords us an incisive insight into how the idea of nation conditions experiences of misrecognition for minorities and how, in turn, claims for the recognition of difference are discursively entangled with notions of national belonging.

From ‘dead’ to ‘living’ universality Of all the categories of Enlightenment thought, universalism is easily one of the most contentious (Carey and Trakulhun, 2009: 240). As ‘the assumption that there are irreducible features of human life and experience that exist beyond the constitutive effects of local conditions’ (Ashcroft et al., 2007: 216), universalism has come to occupy a precarious place in social theory since the advent of poststructuralist thought in the 1980s, with the universal widely regarded as a suspect, if not inherently problematic, category. Postcolonial scholars have been amongst those at the forefront of this critique. Far from an inclusive and progressive force, they have argued that the Enlightenment undertaking to articulate a universal human essence and ‘fashion history in a grand narrative of social progress’ (Carey and Trakulhun, 2009: 240) has in fact masked and legitimated highly exclusionary aims, not least of which is the European colonial project itself. In legislating the assumedly universal category of ‘man’, universalist narratives of reason and history have not only been ‘predicated on the exclusion and marginalisation of his Others, such as “woman” and “the native”’ (Young, 1990: 241) but have also served to relegate colonised peoples to the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 8) where they must be (forcibly or benevolently) led by the hand to political modernity. Rather than a neutral sign of inclusion, then, universalism has been charged with offering ‘a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant culture [namely, Europe] are held to be true for all humanity’ (Ashcroft et al., 2007: 216). As such, the universal is often equated with assimilation, exclusion, violence and the ‘axiomatics of imperialism’ (Spivak, 1991: 801) in postcolonial thought, representing an imposition of Western values and categories of thought at the expense of difference and diversity. In Provincialising Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 5) writes that ‘postcolonial scholarship is committed, almost by definition, to engaging the universals – such as the abstract figure of the human or that of Reason – that were forged in eighteenth-century Europe and underlie the human sciences’. Some postcolonial scholars have been wont to regard the universal as forever tainted by its fundamental exclusions and thus unsalvageable for emancipatory use, relegating this engagement to one of repudiation in favour of vesting

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hope in particulars.1 For Chakrabarty, however, the postcolonial engagement with universality does not rest in its rejection, but rather in the struggle to harness the inclusionary and liberatory promise of universal categories while remaining assiduously attentive to their exclusions and potential for misuse. Much like Fanon struggled to maintain the Enlightenment idea of the human ‘even when he knew that European imperialism had reduced that idea to the figure of the settler-colonial white man’, Chakrabarty argues that this struggle remains as relevant today, ‘because there is no easy way of dispensing with these universals in the condition of political modernity. Without them there would be no social science that addresses issues of modern social justice.’ Asking how we can read the history of political modernity without situating Europe as point of origin and comparison, he locates the project of provincialising Europe in the ‘struggle to hold in a state of permanent tension a dialogue between the Enlightenment promise of an abstract, universal but never-to-be-realised humanity [and] … diverse ways of being’ (p. 92). Embracing Chakrabarty’s take on the universal as both ‘indispensable and inadequate’ (p. 88), in this section I consider how we can imagine the relationship between particularity and universality in the politics of recognition: how are struggles for the recognition of difference entwined with the universal, and how, in turn, might they act upon it? To this end, I focus on Judith Butler’s part of her exchange with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Butler et al., 2000). Butler may, at first glance, appear an unusual choice. Highly critical of claims to universality, especially in their foundational variants, Butler (1992: 6) recognises that the sign of the universal is all too often used to legislate an ‘insidious cultural imperialism’ which violently oppresses the Other and forces them to assimilate to an homogenous cultural field. Certainly, Butler has taken a particularly severe approach to the question of universality in her older work (e.g. 1992),2 where she, admittedly, could only see it as ‘an imperialist ruse, a formal effort to espouse a set of values that were then unilaterally imposed on all cultures at all times’ (Butler, 2004a: 60–1). More recently, however, Butler (2000, 2004a, 2004b) has ‘softened’ her position towards universality, acknowledging its indispensability for politics and differentiating between a ‘dead’ universality premised on fixed ideological notions and a ‘living’ universality engaged in a ‘permanent process of questioning and renegotiation of its “official” content’ (Žižek in Butler et al., 2000: 102). I see Butler as particularly valuable for two key reasons. The first is that Butler’s work is grounded by a concern with political struggle and activism in particular, as well as a strong commitment to refuse any conception of theory that would section itself off from action (Butler et al., 2000: 272). Significantly for our purposes, a great many of the political struggles Butler has engaged are rooted in questions of identity and difference – she is, after all, an exceedingly influential figure in feminist engagements with identity and identity politics – and thus have immediate relevance for the politics of recognition. The second is that Butler has sought to articulate a theory of agency that incorporates an

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understanding of power as constitutive and productive of social life and subjectivity, a project that has been defined by exploring the possibilities for resistance and counter-hegemonic transformation. Butler takes her understanding of hegemony from Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s formulation in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), which is situated within a radical democratic tradition.3 Drawing on the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, hegemony in this tradition is understood as signifying the ‘articulatory practices through which a certain order is established and the meaning of social institutions is fixed’ (Mouffe, 2005: 18). Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony foregrounds the coexistence of force and consent in relations of domination, wherein the ruled tacitly consent to their being ruled through an identification with the worldview of the ruling class. Much like Foucault’s approach to discourse, the conception of power denoted by hegemony points to its instabilities and unevenness as it is remade at various junctures in everyday life. While it is difficult to conceive of the world in a way that would directly challenge the hegemonic culture, the identification with the ruling class’s worldview is never complete and hegemonic powers must always seek to convince the ruled of the legitimacy of their worldview – hegemony is thus never static but constantly evolving and leaves space for anomalous or subversive practices (Jackson Lears, 1985: 569–71). As such, ‘every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices, i.e. practices which attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install another form of hegemony’ (Mouffe, 2005: 18). For Butler, hegemony designates the ways in which the constitutive exclusions of democratic polities come back to ‘haunt’ them, becoming ‘politically effective in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and rearticulation of the basic premises of democracy itself ’ (p. 11).4 There are clear overlaps here with her theory of performativity developed in Gender Trouble (1990), which engages how norms are never simply ‘there’ but must be articulated over and over again in order to maintain their normative status – this process of rearticulation produces an excess and slippage of meaning, through which new social possibilities can emerge. The classical philosophical schema conceptualises the universal as entirely separate from the particular and only graspable by reason – unless the particular recognises itself as the universal, thus ceasing to be particular, the particular can only ever corrupt the universal (Laclau, 1995: 95). Butler reads through Hegel a more dialectical relationship between universal and particular that allows for an understanding of the universal as a site of hegemonic contest. Hegel points to a constitutive paradox in the idea of the universal, where its abstract proclamations to be all encompassing necessarily conflict with its concrete expressions. In Butler’s words: what is universal is … what pertains to every person, but it is not everything that pertains to every person. Indeed, if we can say that conceptions, states of consciousness, feelings, what is specific and what is living

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Universality thus rests on an exclusion of particularity, which undoes its universal aspirations: there is no way to bring the excluded particularity into the universal without first negating that particularity. And that negation would only confirm once again that universality cannot proceed without destroying that which it purports to include. Moreover, the assimilation of the particular into the universal leaves its trace, an unassimilable remainder, which renders universality ghostly to itself. (p. 24) For Butler, it is precisely the exclusions of universality that render the universal vulnerable to new articulations, as it can never be what it proclaims to be. Indeed, universality’s exclusions work to mobilise new sets of demands – for example, the exclusion of gays and lesbians from dominant understandings of the ‘human’ allows the demand for ‘gay and lesbian human rights’ to be mobilised (pp. 39–40). It is therefore the case that while universality necessitates exclusion for its articulation, it at the same time provides the conditions in which to interrogate and transform these exclusions. The universal is thus a site of ‘performative contradiction’ (p. 38), where the ‘clinging’ of the particular to the universal exposes its claims as partial and ‘inaugurates a set of debates and a set of challenges’ that demand the rearticulation of the universal ‘again and again’ (Butler, 2004a: 61). It is for this reason, Butler argues, that we should be wary of formalist approaches to universality which seek to fix certain principles, for they deny the ways in which the ‘fundamental sociability of humans’ (p. 18) means that what is considered universal at any given time is necessarily both partial and subject to revision. What are the implications of this for interpreting the dynamics of political struggles for recognition? What possibilities may such struggles hold for the articulation of new political formations? Contrary to arguments that suggest such struggles are merely in the service of particularity, Butler shows us that there is no firm line dividing the universal from the particular, and that what is designated ‘particular’ is patently the result of the hegemonic power relations that structure the field of the political (p. 178).5 Moreover, given the shifting and unstable character of hegemony, Butler maintains that what is ‘universal’ and what is ‘particular’ is not always straightforward and that claims can function as both particular and universal in orientation. As the quote from Butler in the epigraph suggests, the ways in which the ‘semantics’ of claims are unavoidably entangled with political context very often makes the distinction between particular and universal less than clear-cut (p. 33).

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Consider, for instance, demands for ‘women’s human rights’, or ‘gay and lesbian human rights’: both represent an uneasy synthesis of universality/ particularity as the universal concept of human rights is articulated in the name of preserving a particular struggle (pp. 38–9). Like feminist struggles to reconcile sexual difference with universal enfranchisement (e.g. Scott, 1996), such political claims can not only ‘denote the particular in one context and the universal in another’ (p. 33), but are ‘neither exclusively universal nor exclusively particular’ (p. 40). Instead, they expose the ‘particular interests that inhere in certain cultural formulations of universality’, serving as a reminder that ‘no universal is freed from its contamination by the particular contexts from which it emerges and in which it travels’. Acknowledging that the universal is thoroughly shaped by the cultural norms of its site of articulation is the lynchpin on which Butler’s account rests, and positions her in opposition to other theorists who regard the universal as an ‘empty space’ absent of any shared content (e.g. Laclau, 1995). If there is ‘no possibility of extricating the universal claim from the particular’ (p. 33), she asks, could it be that ‘the particular is a competing claim to universality intrinsic to the particular movement itself ?’ (p. 166). To return to the ‘women’s human rights’ example above, this take would indeed seem to hold – in running up against a hegemonic vision of the subject of human rights as a man, the claim for women’s human rights posits its own alternative vision of the human which includes the female subject, in and of her difference, as equally worthy of human status. In this regard, struggles for hegemony are as much ‘competing universalisms’ as they are efforts to mobilise on behalf of an excluded particularity. For Butler, approaching such claims as competing universalisms opens up the possibility of a politics grounded on the principle of cultural translation. In order to be recognised as an appeal to universality, a political claim must be mounted within a given cultural syntax or a comprehensible set of normative conventions. Adjudicating between competing notions of universality therefore requires translating between different cultural norms; without translation, the only way the very concept of universality itself ‘can cross a border is through a colonial and expansionist logic’ (p. 35).6 Significantly, then, the notion of cultural translation does not treat cultures as if they were ‘bounded entities’, but instead regards ‘the mode of their exchange’ as ‘constitutive of their identity’ (p. 20). The universal is the site in which this relation of exchange between different cultures plays out, in turn shaping the political conditions of struggles for hegemony. Bringing discussion more directly back to struggles for the recognition of difference, I regard Butler’s notion of competing universalisms to be an especially useful ‘reorienting’ device. Not all representational struggles take place within the peculiar syntax of a competing universal claim – as she emphasises, many movements for political enfranchisement operate with a different relationship to the universal, ‘where the universal comes to be insubstantial unless the claims of the particular are included within the universal’ (p. 166) – and if they are this may be as much a matter of tactics as it is context.

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However, if we are to acknowledge both the dialectical relationship of universal/particular and the cultural particularity of all claims to the ‘universal’ it is well worth our while to read more closely how claims for the recognition of cultural particularity are positioned in relation to universality. As Butler writes, ‘it would be a mistake to reduce the politics of multiculturalism to the politics of particularity’ (p. 169) and if we are to harness the potential of such struggles for open-ended democratic contestation then it is critical to engage what forms and contents of universality they express or have embedded within them. It is here that I would like to turn to postcolonial feminism, as it affords us a more concrete example of how claims for the recognition of difference are engaged in the struggle for hegemony, where the claims of particularity are used to expose and dislodge the partialities of the hegemonic universal, in turn presenting a competing vision of universality to take its place.

Postcolonial feminism and the struggle for recognition Given the fundamental exclusion of women in Enlightenment narratives of universal reason and history (Schott, 1996), feminism, too, has quite rightly been wary of appeals to universality. If much of feminist struggle has been dedicated to exposing and contesting the unacknowledged gendering of the universal category ‘human’ and the various forms of exclusions it produces for women and girls, more recently feminism has come to be defined by the struggle against the unacknowledged exclusions of the category ‘woman’ itself. Historically, the focus on sex as the primary indicator of oppression has meant that the differences of race, class, culture and sexuality played only a minimal role in early articulations of feminism, with feminist struggle oriented largely around the concerns of middle-class, white, Western women (Weedon, 1999). Coming to terms with the structurally dominant position of white women is arguably the characteristic feature of second-wave feminism, a phase of feminist struggle that originated in the 1960s and is widely considered to have reached its culmination in the 1980s (Bulbeck, 1998). The commonly cited narrative of the second wave is one of gradual enlightenment and maturation in the feminist movement, as white Western women were forced to confront the exclusion of women of colour, lesbians and other marginalised women in the movement (e.g. Eisenstein, 1985; Showalter, 1986; Jaggar, 1988; Ryan, 1992). Progressing through an ideological path that began with ‘women are the same as men’, shifted through ‘women are different to men’ and ‘women are superior to men’ to the final realisation that ‘women are all different’,7 the typical second-wave story is one of feminism attempting to open itself up to diversity so as not to assimilate women’s differences to a particular model of ‘womanhood’.8 While the dominant position accorded to white Western women continues to be challenged in the so-called ‘third wave’, which broadly speaking refers to feminism’s acceptance and embracing of pluralist thinking (Kinser, 2004: 133),9 it is nevertheless the case that its legacy remains a defining feature of contemporary feminist debates.

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Postcolonial feminists, alongside women of colour and black feminists, have provided one of the most pronounced and vigorous challenges to the premises and persistence of white hegemonic feminism (Ahmed, 2000: 111). Specifically, they have questioned the primacy that mainstream feminism accords to sex as the sole determinant of women’s social experience and standing, pointing to the ways in which other axes of identity such as race, ethnicity, nationality and class ‘intersect’ (Crenshaw, 1991) in the lives of women, particularly those marked as Other. Oppression thus does not occur along a singular axis, but patriarchy colludes and overlaps with other forms of oppression such as racism or classism – ‘even if we say all women are oppressed by sexism’, Elizabeth Spelman (1988: 14) writes, ‘we cannot automatically conclude that the sexism that all women experience is the same’ (my emphasis). The argument is that the inattentiveness to difference in mainstream feminism is indicative of a false universalising of white Western women’s experiences that replicates the same ideological patterns of European colonialism (Spivak, 1991), whereby white Western women seek to create feminism in their own image, subsuming women’s differences into a homogenous model that sanctions the voices of a few and marginalises the rest. As such, white Western feminism is accused of an underlying racism that goes against its aspiration of articulating a universal sisterhood. When white feminists ‘write their herstory and call it the story of women but ignore our lives and deny their relation to us’, Hazel Carby suggests (1997: 50–1), ‘that is the moment in which they are acting within the relations of racism’. Furthermore, postcolonial feminists also challenge how, when differences are considered in mainstream feminism, they are often reductive and stereotypical. Of course, these two charges are by no means opposing. Conceptions of sameness necessarily rely on a constitutive Other for their operationalisation. The argument is that, in writing the category of ‘woman’ from the standpoint of white, Western, middle-class women, mainstream feminism designated other women ‘lesser-than’, and therefore inferior. Chandra Mohanty’s (1985) seminal essay ‘Under Western eyes’ criticises the way in which many mainstream feminist texts are involved in the (re)production of ‘the “Third World Woman” as a singular monolithic subject’ (p. 333). Mohanty shows how Third World women tend to be depicted by white Western feminists as powerless victims of men as well as their own culture and traditions. In ‘discursively colonising’ the ‘heterogeneities of the lives of women in the Third World’, such representations have the effect of freezing Third World women in space, time and history (p. 334). Furthermore, the image of the sexually repressed, tradition-bound and uneducated ‘Third World Woman’ is typically set up ‘in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities and the “freedom” to make their own decisions’ (p. 337). With the Third World woman accorded the status of object, the Western woman is elevated to the status of subject through being able to identify and describe the oppression of the former. However, as Sara Ahmed (2000: 165) points

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out, the image of the Third World woman is not just about defining what Western women are not (and therefore what they are), but also what they used to be. Third World women are thus represented as ‘strangers to feminism, those who are already recognised as “out of time” and hence “out of place”’. The implication is that Third World feminisms are not unique responses or emergences from local conditions, but are instead outcomes of applying ‘Western feminism’ to non-Western contexts – thus reproducing the historicist axiom ‘first in the West, then in the rest’, to paraphrase Chakrabarty (2000: 5). In some ways, feminism has not been able to fully recover from such challenges. Postcolonial feminists’ insistence on the need to recognise women’s differences – and their parallel avowal that sex is not necessarily the main axis of oppression in many women’s lives – poses a fundamental ontological challenge to feminism: how can a sense of ‘women’ as a social collective be maintained? As Butler says, now ‘the very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms … women has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause of anxiety’ (1990: 1, 3). It is with this awareness of the difficulties of speaking of women as a homogenous group that the notion of difference has become ‘an obligatory tenet in feminist discourse’ (Ang, 2003: 58). With the imperialising tendencies of hegemonic feminism’s assertion of women’s fundamental sameness exposed by postcolonial feminists (amongst others), feminism has responded with a shift to the opposite side of the universal/particular dichotomy, where any enquiries into the universal are feared unavoidably preclusive of difference and the structures of power which construct differences (Dean, 1996: 7). The ‘turn to difference’ and away from universal concerns has in many regards rendered normative claims passé in mainstream feminist theory, leading some to label difference as the new ‘doxa’10 of feminist theory, ‘a magic word of theory and politics radiant with redemptive meanings’ (Felski, 1997: 1). Certainly, it has often been the case that the haste to right the imperialist wrongs of white hegemonic feminism has signalled a valorising of difference in and of itself: something which is perhaps best evidenced in the increasing popularity of a strong cultural relativism especially in the 1990s which, with the enfranchisement of the view that there can be no non-imperialist means to arbitrate between values, saw difference itself become the value par excellence (Nussbaum, 1992: 202–5). This is often the lens through which postcolonial feminist interjections are viewed. Interpreted as emphasising particularity or espousing the value of ‘situated knowledges’, postcolonial critiques of hegemonic feminism have repeatedly been understood as indictments against the notion of universality (Walby, 2000: 199; Mohanty, 2003: 224). This is not exactly the case, however.11 A number of postcolonial feminists (e.g. Trinh, 1998; Narayan, 2000a, 2000b; Schutte, 2000; Mohanty, 2003) have pointed out that in the rush to recognise the differences between women, the fetishisation and institutionalisation of differences related to culture in particular has often occurred. Uma Narayan (2000b) offers a thoughtful explication of how many feminists have replaced the gender essentialism of earlier feminisms with a form of cultural

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essentialism she calls the ‘Package Picture of Cultures’, in which ‘seemingly universal essentialist generalisations about “all women” are replaced by culture specific generalisations that depend on totalising categories such as “Western culture”, “non-Western cultures”, “Indian women” and “Muslim women”’ (Narayan, 2000b: 1083). Naturally, the assumption that there is such a thing as a singular ‘Western culture’ or a typical ‘Muslim woman’ is necessarily flawed. Moreover, as much as to impose sameness is to imperialise, it is important to recognise that the declaration of fundamental difference is too an imperialising gesture. As Narayan (2000a: 83) asserts, ‘[r]educing “cultural imperialism” to the problem of “the imposition of Sameness” conceals the importance of the role that sharply-contrasting essentialist pictures of “cultural difference” between “Western culture” and its various “Others” played in colonial times’. The subterfuge of dominant images of cultural difference is institutionalised whenever they are uncritically reproduced. This, most certainly, is a problem for feminists designated as Other, as it is the institutionalisation of difference (such as the stereotypical ‘Third World woman’) that drives the demand for recognition in the first place. As Narayan (2000a: 85–6) writes, critiquing understandings of culture as fixed ought to be particularly poignant for feminists. Considering that it is most often women who suffer more from the demands of ‘culture’ and the preservation of ‘tradition’, feminists should maintain scepticism towards any claims of culture that verge on essentialism.12 Indeed, the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘women’ has always been a problematic one, especially on the level of ‘cultural rights’ versus ‘women’s rights’ (e.g. Shachar, 2000). As Susan Moller Okin (1999: 31) has argued, all too often the ‘culture card’ is played to excuse women’s inequalities and practices that harm women.13 It is in this context that men who beat their wives or rape women can justify their actions through ‘cultural prescription’ – and these are justifications that continue to be accepted in the courts and mainstream discourses in many places across the globe (Volpp, 1994). Conversely, there is a very real possibility that sexist minority practices are employed to justify majority racism, particularly given the ways in which claims of sexism are increasingly interwoven with the fabric of contemporary racism. Discourses of ‘how we treat our women and how they treat theirs’ are not only commonly employed to undermine multiculturalism, playing a central role in the multicultural backlash (Eisenberg, 2010), but have indeed played an important role in contemporary neo-colonialist geopolitics such as the US-led ‘War on Terror’ (Puar, 2007). This tension between sexual justice and cultural justice has arguably emerged as one of the major challenges for the universal relevance of the feminist struggle in the current context of increasingly politicised cultural diversity. Competing universalisms If postcolonial feminists have set about challenging mainstream feminism to account for its exclusion of othered women, it is important to underscore that

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this is not in the service of valorising ‘difference’. Mohanty (2003: 216) puts this succinctly: ‘what is at stake is not the mere recognition of difference. The sort of difference that is acknowledged and engaged has fundamental significance for the decolonisation’ of the feminist community (my emphasis). This entails moving beyond free-floating conceptions of difference as ‘positively Other’ (Braidotti, 1991: 177) to recognise difference as inherently shaped by history and relations of power. From the postcolonial perspective, the structures of Western hegemony instilled by centuries of European colonial domination are naturally afforded a principal role. This critical engagement with history, however, is not so we can peel back layers of oppression and power in order to unearth some ‘authentic’ difference at the bottom of it all (Felski, 1997: 2). As postcolonial feminists know all too well, there is no ‘authentic’ difference to unearth, no identity that is complete unto itself. How then do postcolonial feminists imagine the project of recognition within the feminist community? Much like Butler suggests, they mount their claims as competing universalisms of sorts, where in exposing the partialities of the hegemonic conception of ‘sisterhood’ they present their own, alternative, visions of the feminist community, which is neither an incorporation of ‘different’ women into white Western feminism nor a splintering of feminism into ever smaller ‘sub’ feminisms. Here, I would like to read through two broad approaches to the question of difference in feminism: one is a ‘politics of partiality’ advocated by feminists like Ien Ang, and the other is the commitment to a more ‘inclusive’ feminist politics, favoured by scholars like Mohanty and Narayan. Despite the seeming divergences in the particular routes they adopt, these scholars approach the recognition of difference as inherently intertwined with a substantive interrogation of the hegemonic terms and contents productive of the universal/particular distinction and the ways in which it lays out relationships between different women in the feminist community. In ‘I’m a feminist but …’ (2003), Ang rallies against the turn to difference in mainstream feminism in Australia, which she sees as akin to a shift from a policy of assimilation to one of multiculturalism. Rather than being compelled to renege on her difference to be recognised as a feminist, she is now invited by ‘white’ feminists ‘to raise [her] “voice” qua a non-white woman, and make [her]self heard’ (p. 190). For Ang, the ‘multicultural’ effort to preserve the sense of a united sisterhood through concepts like ‘recognition’ or ‘dialogue’ is fundamentally flawed, because it misreads how the persistence of white Western hegemony has made for an ‘ontological binary opposition between white/Western women and “other” women’ (p. 197) wherein they are positioned in a structural, hierarchical interrelationship with each other (p. 200). Not only does the invitation for other women to ‘represent a “Chinese” or “Asian” contribution to Australian feminism’ objectify and fetishise such difference (p. 190), but the attempt to deal with difference ‘by absorbing it into an already existing feminist community’ does not challenge ‘the naturalised legitimacy and status of that community as a community’ (p. 192). Accordingly, Ang’s prescription is that:

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feminism must stop conceiving of itself as a nation, a ‘natural’ political destination for all women, no matter how multicultural. Rather than adopting a politics of inclusion (which is ultimately based on a notion of commonality and community), it will have to develop a self-conscious politics of partiality, and imagine itself as a limited political home, which does not absorb difference within a pre-given and predefined space but leaves room for ambivalence and ambiguity. (p. 191) Invoking the notion of cultural incommensurability, which suggests there often exists an ‘irreparable chasm’ between different knowledges and experiences, Ang’s argument is that there are moments in which feminists must admit they do not understand each other. Drawing on black and white feminist readings of the pop singer Madonna, she contends that there is such a radical discrepancy between the two that there is no possibility of a ‘harmonious compromise’ or ‘negotiated consensus’ (p. 196). Whereas white feminists laud Madonna for ‘her power to act in sexually rebellious ways without being punished’ (p. 195), black women cannot see her as liberating because dominant myths of ‘sexually “fallen”’ black women mean that they are ‘more concerned with projecting images of respectability than with the idea of female sexual agency and transgression’ (hooks, 1992: 160, cited in Ang, 2003: 196). In such a context, Ang continues, ‘a reconciliation between different points of view is difficult to imagine’, for deleting the specificities of one would mean slighting the other. It is fair to say that Ang overstates her case in terms of incommensurability in this particular instance, not least because her example of ‘unbreachable’ cultural truths is limited to the claims of a handful of white American feminists and one black feminist – the latter who clearly understands the white feminist argument but takes issue with it. Nonetheless, her general point that ‘we would gain more from acknowledging and confronting the stubborn solidity of “communication barriers” rather than rushing to confront them in the name of an idealised unity’ (p. 193) is well taken. In emphasising that people often come at the same issues from radically divergent horizons of meaning, Ang warns feminists away from a consensual liberal vision of ‘unity in diversity’ that emphasises harmony, commonality and community above all else, and highlights moments of seeming incommensurability as some of the most productive for cultural translation and cross-cultural understanding. It is in positioning the politics of partiality as a mid-point between the pathways of assimilation and the consensual liberal ‘multicultural nation’, however, that Ang’s argument seems to turn in on itself. As she explains, the politics of partiality: implies that feminism must emphasise and consciously construct the limits of its own field of political intervention. While a politics of inclusion is driven by an ambition for universal representation (of all women’s

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Contingent universals, shifting particulars interests), a politics of partiality does away with that ambition and accepts the principle that feminism can never ever be an encompassing political home for all women, not just because different groups of women have different and sometimes conflicting interests, but more radically, because for many groups of ‘other’ women other interests, other identifications are sometimes more important and politically pressing than, or even incompatible with, those related to being women. (p. 204)

Again, her point that matters of cultural justice will sometimes be more urgent than those of sexual justice is well taken. Nevertheless, there is a staticness to Ang’s account that demands deeper reading. Most problematically, her solution seems to rest on a version of the ‘right to exit’ where ‘other’ women may decide to leave feminism in favour of other interests – leaving feminism again to the purview of white Western women. As much as this is a reduction of ‘non-othered’ women to mobilise around other causes (for all white women’s privileges, where is the space for them to rally against the history that would have them silenced too? (Spivak, 1990: 62)), it does not unsettle Ang’s complaint that feminism is articulated in the name of white women; instead, it seems to reinscribe the idea that othered women are secondary in and to feminism. Coincidentally, this is also a critique made of postcolonial feminists who take the second route of agitating for a more inclusive feminism. Mohanty, for instance, is a strong advocate for a more nuanced feminism that admits contestations around the category of ‘woman’ but does not splinter into ‘subfeminisms’; yet, she has also been charged with a tendency to universalise Western feminism. In deconstructing Mohanty’s ‘Under Western eyes’, Claire Chambers and Susan Watkins (2012: 298) argue that there are a number of slippages in her argument that mean ‘the term “feminism” is itself treated as a stable, transhistorical critical and political position’. Whereas Mohanty does emphasise that ‘Western feminism is neither homogenous or singular in its goals, interests or analyses’ (p. 334), Chambers and Watkins suggest that: the slippage in the title of the essay, which moves the term ‘Western’ to the main title and leaves the term ‘feminism’ unqualified in the subtitle, does make a series of substitutions which imply first, that all feminism is Western feminism; second, that all feminist scholarship is Western feminist scholarship; and third, that all Western feminist scholarship is the same. Likewise, Spivak’s early essays ‘French feminism in an international frame’ (1981) and ‘French feminism revisited: Ethics and politics’ (1992) attempted to articulate the relations between Third World and First World feminists not through a notion of equivalence (the common female body), but rather exchange. For Spivak (1992: 54), ‘the face of “global” feminism [should be]

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turned outward and must be welcomed and respected as such, rather than fetishised as the figure of the Other’. Part of this is to construct Western (in her case, French) feminism as a necessary ‘gift’ that can be utilised or not utilised by the Third World feminist in the way she sees fit. In doing so, she hopes to collapse the seemingly impassable and asymmetric avenues of First World/Third World knowledge exchange to theorise the possibilities of international feminist solidarity. Even so, Spivak’s task has been critiqued for centring ‘her internationalism on the west [in such a way] that maintains the integrity of both poles and burdens the [Third World] feminist with indelible historical marks’ (Jalalzai, 2002: 45). In other words, she has been charged with not only realigning the West/rest distinction, but also recentring Western feminism leaving the Third World feminist with only the option to respond. My feeling is that these critiques miss the mark somewhat, insofar as they presume any appeal to universal feminism is reinforcing the unequal relations of power that construct and sustain that universal. Put differently, they overlook that it is precisely the terrain of the universal on which Mohanty and Spivak base their interventions. As Mohanty argues, ‘the challenge [of difference] is to see how differences allow us to explain the connections and border crossings more fully and more accurately, how specifying difference allows us to theorise universal concerns more fully’ (2003: 226, my emphasis). Sylvia Walby puts it this way: Mohanty and other postcolonial feminists are often interpreted as arguing only for situated knowledges in popularisations of their work. In fact, Mohanty is claiming, via a complex and subtle argument, that she is right and that (much) white Western feminism is not merely different, but wrong. In doing this she assumes a common question, a common set of contexts, and, ultimately, the possibility of, a common political project with white feminism. She hopes to argue white feminism into agreeing with her. She is not content to leave white Western feminism as a situated knowledge, comfortable with its local and partial perspective. Not a bit of it. This is a claim to a more universal truth. (2000: 199, my emphasis) Instead of dismissing the universal outright, deeming it already tainted by its exclusions, Mohanty is making a case for an improved understanding of what does constitute universality: hers is a strategic intervention into the shape of the universal. This is perhaps made most explicit in the work of Narayan, who points out that although she endorses and promotes the careful consideration of difference, this does not mean that she sees this as immediately rendering any generalisation or universalist claim immediately suspect. In advocating colonial history as a productive ground for the interrogation of West/Third World relations, for instance, she suggests that:

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Contingent universals, shifting particulars working together to develop a rich feminist account of this history that divides and connects us might well provide Western and Third-World feminists [with] some difficult but interesting common ground, and be a project that is crucial and central to any truly ‘international’ feminist politics. (Narayan, 1997: 80)

For Narayan, what is problematic is not universalism itself, but rather pseudouniversalism, which is when particularity poses as the universal – such as when the white, Western woman poses as the ‘universal feminist’ (2000a: 98). If emphasising particularity is not automatically liberating or emancipatory, universalism is a claim that cannot be avoided: as she suggests, ‘even the injunction to attend to a variety of “differences” can hardly avoid the universalistic cast of a general prescription, and no political agenda can avoid general normative assessments of the salience and weight of particular kinds of “differences”’ (2000a: 98). Narayan, like Mohanty and Spivak, works from the presumption that universal claims are not only inevitable, but necessary for feminist politics. As Young (1994: 718) asserts, without some conception of women as a social collective, feminist politics evaporates. The point is to get a better understanding of the universal, to decolonise feminism from the inside out; Ang’s politics of partiality is no solution here. Nevertheless, I suggest that Ang can be seen as doing something similar to Narayan, Mohanty and Spivak, which is most evident in the qualifier she asserts as necessary to the politics of partiality: ‘I’m a feminist, but …’. Whereas Ang’s insistence on an ontological binary distinction between white/ Western women and other women leads her to see this as a structural inevitability that determines ‘the limits of political possibilities, not as something we can work to undo’ (p. 198), this element of ontological inevitability in her account runs up against the work she intends the statement ‘I’m a feminist but’ to do – that is, to problematise ‘the meaning and substance of feminism itself ’ (p. 190, my emphasis). While she quite rightfully cautions against ‘feminism’s assumption of a “master discourse” (Chow, 1991: 98) position’, she argues that ‘feminism must emphasise and consciously construct the limits of its own field of political intervention’ (p. 204). Who determines those limits, who plays a part in demarcating them? Contrary to these limits already being fixed, she implies that, in fact, she – and other women like her – play a key role in this task of consciously constructing and articulating feminism’s limits. While none of the scholars I have discussed are under any illusions that the structures associated with white Western hegemony can be easily done away with, what is thus striking to me is how the presentation of a competing universal claim necessitates a conception of hegemonic contestation. Put differently, a competing universalism cannot function if it is to approach structures of hegemonic domination as effectively incontestable. To be fair to Ang, she is careful to point out that ‘white’ and ‘West’ are neither ‘biological facts’ nor ‘a

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precise set of cultural identities’ (p. 200), rather they are social signifiers whose contents are historically mutable and contingent to the site of articulation. However, as I have suggested, her avowal that these are the ‘master discourse’ that structurally defines all relations and sets the limits of political intervention is precisely where her otherwise important intervention runs up against its own limits as a competing universalism. Where Ang is arguably at her strongest is her reminder that there is sometimes ‘an irreparable chasm’ between different truths and that ‘these moments of ultimate failure of communication should not be encountered with regret, but rather … accepted as the starting point for a more modest feminism’ (p. 193). Such a take is analogous to Butler’s (2000: 37) reflections on cultural translation, where translation’s counter-colonialist possibility lies in bringing ‘into relief the nonconvergence of discourses so that one may know through the very ruptures of narrativity the founding violences of an episteme’. What can we take away from Ang’s, Mohanty’s and Narayan’s respective interventions? For all their divergences, difference, they remind us, is not an end point in itself; there are some meanings that simply cannot be translated. In any case difference is forged by a complicated and conflictual entanglement of power, history and experience. Difference, they seem to imply, is better served as an empowering factor of the key question in feminism: ‘who is we?’ (Rich, 2003: 41). Like Fanon, the recognition of difference cannot be disentangled from political identity.

Feminism to nation: reorienting multicultural recognition struggles In this last section, I ask whether multicultural struggles for the recognition of difference can be thought of in a similar way; that is, whether demands for the affirmation of difference can be seen as impinging on the false universality of hegemonic visions of the nation and, in turn, positing their own conception of the national ‘we’. As I have already acknowledged, this is by no means a selfevident task. As much as nation is an essentially contestable concept, the cockiness of political nationalism as an ideology and the enduring character of many dominant national symbols mean that we often underestimate just how radically conceptions of national identity can change over time (Armstrong, 1982: 78). Moreover, the invariable ethnic contents of conceptions of nationhood would seem to structurally limit the forms multicultural challenges may take and the wider political possibilities they present. As Butler (2000: 167) emphasises, the universal is never ‘empty’ in the sense that it can be filled with any content at any time; the conception of universality that is hegemonically dominant dictates to a large extent the terms that can be considered to be within its purview. One of the critical things about the concept of hegemony is that, as much as it points to the instabilities of power and its always present potential to be disarticulated, it also designates the ways in which hegemonic structures of dominance are productive of certain subjectivities and modes of identification. This naturally makes counter-hegemonic practice

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difficult, for there is always the possibility that it becomes folded, once again, into hegemony’s dominant terms. In the context of nation, the point is thus not to claim that it is radically open to revision. Rather, the important point is that identification with the hegemonic vision of national identity is never complete – and that the claims of cultural minorities are well positioned to expose and denaturalise that vision. Ghassan Hage’s work offers us a particularly useful way of conceptualising nation as a hegemonic field of power structured around the notion of the ‘ideal national’. White Nation (1998) is now a classic in Australian scholarship on multiculturalism and nationalism, and its critique of the ways in which discourses and practices of multiculturalism are embedded in white– ethnic power relations has been enormously influential in the field of critical multicultural studies. For Hage, the question of who is included and who is excluded in the nation reaches beyond the realm of formal citizenship, and is more practically enacted in the cultural-symbolic arena of national acceptance. As he points out, structures of national inclusion and belonging are not a simple question of in/out, but rather of varying degrees. ‘People strive to accumulate nationality. They recognise themselves as more national than some people and less national than others. They are also recognised by others in a similar fashion’ (p. 52). Taking his inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of cultural capital, Hage suggests that this process of accumulation can be explained through the idea of national capital, or as he calls it ‘practical nationality’. Practical nationality refers to ‘the sum of accumulated nationally sanctified and valued social and physical styles and dispositions (national culture) … as well as valued characteristics (national types and national character) within a national field’ (p. 53). This includes things like appearance, language, culturally valued knowledges and behaviours, modes of interaction, accents and mannerisms. The point of accumulating this national capital is to ultimately convert it into national belonging – ‘to have [one’s] accumulated national capital recognised as legitimately national by the dominant cultural grouping in the field’ (p. 53). From this perspective, we can conceptualise the positions of power occupied by different groups in the nation as a matter of accumulated national capital, which allows us to envisage how immigrant and Indigenous minorities are differentially located in the realm of national belonging. While the idea of national capital would seemingly afford a democratic impetus to the dynamics of national belonging, Hage reminds us that the historical characteristics of the national field delimit how much capital can be accrued and to what ends it can be put. As a cultural descendant of northern European colonial domination, the ‘white Australia persona … constitutes the ultimate ideal of the field’ (p. 59). The existence of a national ideal marks a distinction between passive belonging – the feeling of being at home in the nation – and what Hage calls ‘governmental belonging’, which signifies a naturalised dominance where one feels empowered to ‘dictate’ the nation as it were. This naturalisation of dominance is key to the national field, insofar as

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the dominant group, wishing to maintain its privileged position, works to naturalise the value of its capital – thus undermining ‘the legitimacy of any other aspiring capital’ and ‘creating symbolic barriers to its accumulation by less capital endowed groups’ (p. 62). The national field is therefore swayed in favour of the dominant group, as by naturalising their position they are able to make a distinction between ‘being’ national and ‘accumulating’ nationality, to the point where being ‘naturally national’ becomes a form of capital in itself (albeit an exceedingly exclusive form). While ethnic minorities and Aboriginal peoples are able to accumulate practical nationality, Hage shows why they struggle to convert this to governmental belonging and a position of hegemonic dominance; ‘only Aboriginal people,’ he writes, ‘can offer a morally credible form of alternative governmental capital, but such a capital is also impossible to valorise in power terms’ (p. 59). Hage’s particular focus in White Nation is how the structures of governmental belonging in Australia are entangled with a fantasy of white national dominance. This white nationalist fantasy enacts a nationalist practice of exclusion, where ethnic minorities and Aboriginal people are constructed as objects to be managed within national space. Hage argues that racist practices are part and parcel of nationalist practices. His most incisive critique is that racial violence and multicultural tolerance (‘evil nationalism’ versus ‘good nationalism’) are flip-sides of the same ‘white nation’ fantasy, in which white people are the governors of national space. We can see this, for instance, in the contrasting discourses of ‘there are too many immigrants/refugees here’ and ‘there aren’t so many that we should be worried’. It is important to point out that in engaging this in terms of a fantasy, Hage is able to make a distinction between a phantasmic belief in white national dominance and the everyday ordinariness of multiculturalism in Australia, which has seen migrants and Aboriginal people erode to a palpable extent ‘the centrality of White people in Australia’ (p. 22). However, it is precisely this gap between nationalist fantasy and multicultural ordinariness that Hage employs to illustrate the adaptive capacity of the former, where it ‘is able to sustain itself despite the change in the practical social reality in which it is grounded’ (p. 209). Indeed, it could be contended that it garners its urgency from this gap, because those who aspire to national dominance see their control over the nation slip away. Something like this arguably feeds the ‘white backlash’ of the many populist nationalisms emerging across the West at present. If the nation is a universal, Hage’s vision of it is certainly not ‘dead’. The idea of a national field itself is analytically attuned to constant movement produced through the accumulation of national capital. Hage is careful to emphasise that the dominant group is not a homogenous entity, but also constitutes its own internal field characterised by varying degrees of capital. As an ‘everchanging composite cultural historical construct’, whiteness likewise is a fantasy and a field of accumulation – no one can ever be fully White in the sense of being the ideal ‘bearer of “Western” civilisation’ (p. 59). Nonetheless, the picture that Hage offers us of the nation is to a large extent

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determined by the guardians of the threshold of whiteness – in accumulating national capital, minorities may become more culturally white but are positioned in the field of power in such a way that they are precluded from accruing key traits and characteristics that would allow them to enter the national aristocracy of ‘naturally’ white Australians (p. 61). Movement, in this sense, is inwards towards a white centre, which itself shifts and accrues new meanings and attributes at different historical junctures but nevertheless retains a sense of solidity, however much this may be an illusion produced by dynamics of identification. Despite his acknowledgement of the ways in which migrants and Aboriginal people have practically dislodged the centrality of whiteness in Australia, Hage interestingly does not even tangentially consider what this may signify for struggles within the national field.14 The only hegemonic struggle he can envisage is regarding the content of this whiteness, ‘that is whether this ideal type has to remain male as it has always been, or whether it is more Protestant or Catholic, or whether it is specifically Australian or a variant of the British’, but: what is not yet historically challenged … is precisely its most general characteristic as an offshoot of the dominant persona of the White European coloniser type … there can be no struggle in the foreseeable future that would try to challenge this European Whiteness with a Chinese or an Arab ideal of what an Australian is. (p. 59) This oversight is made all the more interesting because, in citing Toril Moi, he acknowledges that ‘if explicit ideological or material struggle between groups or classes develops … symbolic violence may be unmasked and recognised for what it is. In the very moment it is recognised, however, it can no longer function as symbolic violence’ (1991: 1023; cited in Hage, 1998: 206). While he engages this in terms of a hegemonic struggle between ‘Australo-Britishness and White cosmo-multiculturalism’ for national dominance, I want to ask what role might cultural minorities play in this unseating of dominant cultural capital, bringing it ‘back to being a party in the struggle within the field rather than the natural governor of a natural order’? I think this is something Hage alludes to in his later work, where he more explicitly engages how the white fantasy undergirding multicultural nationalism produces for cultural minorities certain affective relationships towards the nation. Specifically, I want to suggest that his notion of mis-interpellation (2008, 2010) affords us a sense of how the unmasking of the symbolic violence of the national ideal is built into minority experiences of state-based nationhood. This, I further want to suggest, accords us a theoretical framework through which we can imagine multicultural claims for recognition embroiled in a competing universalism where the nation is an object of contestation.

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Hage (2010) develops the concept of mis-interpellation most thoroughly in his engagement with Fanon we considered in Chapter 2, and it provides a useful supplement to the ideas of non-recognition and misrecognition so crucial to the recognition paradigm. Turning Althusser to racialisation (that is, how individuals are constituted as racialised subjects), Hage (2010) examines racism as a racial process of interpellation and differentiates between three types. The first he calls non-interpellation, which is ‘a mode of racism linked with the experience of invisibility, where the racialised feel ignored and nonexistent. While they physically exist within the social realm, they are not recognised to exist within the symbolic order’ (p. 121). To be non-interpellated is not to be called from anywhere and is akin to non-recognition in the sense that one is not hailed as a subject – homelessness and the predicaments facing undocumented migrants are strong examples of this. The second is negative interpellation, where the racialised are hailed to particular negative characteristics: that they are ‘lazy, dirty, [a] thief, social problem, etc.’ (p. 122). Negative interpellation is like misrecognition in that the racialised is recognised (and is often highly visible), but only in particular negative or inferiorised ways. The third is the one in which I am interested here. Mis-interpellation is a ‘drama in two acts’: In the first instance the racialised person is interpellated as belonging to a collectivity ‘like everybody else’. S/he is hailed by the cultural group or the nation, or even by modernity which claims to be addressing ‘everyone’. And the yet-to-be-racialised person believes that the hailing is for ‘everyone’ and answers the call thinking that there is a place for him or her awaiting to be occupied. Yet, no sooner do they answer the call and claim their spot than the symbolic order brutally reminds them that they are not part of everyone: ‘No, I wasn’t talking to you. Piss off. You are not part of us’. (p. 122) This is how Hage interprets Fanon’s experience on the train. Fanon has been lured into ‘dropping [his] defenses vis-à-vis the dominant culture thinking for a moment he is not racialised, that [he] can self-constitute [himself] into [a] “normal” universal subject’, only to be rudely reminded of his place in the symbolic order (p. 125). To be mis-interpellated is traumatic because the misinterpellated individual is rendered especially vulnerable by virtue of their rejection in a moment of hope. Mis-interpellation provides an important framework through which to think about the dynamics of misrecognition in a multicultural context like Australia, where the promise of inclusion embedded in multiculturalism is to an extent normalised yet regularly undercut by the realities of social and political discrimination. Hage makes the point that experiences of non- and negative interpellation are common for first-generation immigrants, and to some degree an expected part of the migration and settlement process (p. 126).

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It is the second generation, he suggests, that most often endures the drama of mis-interpellation – not for any failure in assimilation as such, as antimulticulturalists are wont to claim, but rather because of an overassimilation of sorts, where the initial call of inclusivity (the one that is thereafter overturned) does its job too well. Indeed, because the second generation: always get a whiff of the racism experienced by their parents before them, but more importantly, because, unlike their parents, they experience racism from an early age, and because this racism is directed at them with a language and culture that is their own, they develop an excessive and even reactive idealised sense of entitlement to non-discriminatory treatment. (Hage, 2008: 503) The mis-interpellated subject is thus oriented in an ‘emotionally ambivalent relationship to the source of their mis-interpellation’ wherein ‘they continue to valorise it as the source of meaning in their life but they also have aggressive meanings towards it as the source of their rejection’ (p. 124). From this perspective, we can easily understand the frustration, angst and anger felt by many second-generation migrants towards their ‘adoptive’ country.

Conclusion Hage largely restricts his argument to the domain of affect. By way of conclusion, however, I want to engage its potential implications for thinking about the domain of politics as I did in Chapter 2. If the experience of noninterpellation (or non-recognition) compels struggles for acknowledgement and visibility, and the experience of negative interpellation (or misrecognition) compels struggles for valorisation, then what types of political struggle emerge from the experience of mis-interpellation? It is important to remember that as much as ideology exercises power over its subjects, it also equips them with the capacity for contestation and resistance – power is both constraining and enabling in this sense. Even for Althusser (1971: 171), for whom interpellation is largely a top-down affair, there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects of interpellation. The former are those for whom ideology works ‘all by itself ’ and who recognise and submit freely to the existing state of affairs; the latter are those who show the cracks in ideology and ‘provoke the intervention of the ideological state apparatus’. If being a bad subject of interpellation is to fail or refuse to align oneself ‘with the terms in which [one] is interpellated’, there are a number of ways in which the subject may ‘talk back’, as Sarah Bracke (2011: 38, 41–3) suggests. The first is to critique the dominant script and to question the terms in which one has been interpellated, thus taking on the position of ‘bad subject’ with pride. The second is to accept the terms in which one has been interpellated but to reappropriate them. The third is to ignore the call and seek to ‘bypass the hegemonic script altogether’, investing

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instead in ‘a different political and affective economy’. In addition, there may be a ‘ghost of a fourth mode of responding to “the call” of the dominant script – that of silence’ (pp. 42–3). This mode of responding typically emerges when one has a sense that the room by which they have been accorded to move in relation to the dominant script is very limited. I understand mis-interpellation in the multicultural nation as occurring when discourses of diversity run up against exclusionary national imaginaries. If we accept this as a particular form of misrecognition affecting minorities living in culturally diverse societies, then I argue that we are well placed to engage (1) the ways in which the national field may institute a wider set of struggles for hegemony, and (2) how claims for the recognition of difference might be tied up with revising the nation. I have already argued in Chapter 2 that we need to take seriously the ways in which experiences of misrecognition come to shape claims for recognition. Here, I suggest that mis-interpellation as a form of misrecognition produces nation as an object of political contestation and struggle; and indeed, that it may legitimate by way of broken promises a minority critique of its exclusions and partialities. As Bracke (2011) emphasises, to be interpellated vis-à-vis the dominant script – as frustrating and traumatic as it can be – is to also be equipped to critique that script, to appropriate or resignify it, or to even position one’s own economy of understanding as an alternative. There is always the possibility that the moments of social interaction interpellation compels might have significant impact on ideologies and cultures that shape them (Herzfeld, 1997: 61). Moreover, and much like Butler elucidates, there is a clear performative contradiction in the mis-interpellating call, where its proclamations to universality are immediately exposed as partial and the exclusions on which it rests are more than evident for the mis-interpellated subject – this makes any ‘talking back’ to the nation highly political. In the following two chapters, I seek to illustrate this argument by exploring the ways in which the notion of nation discursively feeds into struggles for recognition by Muslim and Indigenous Australians. Like Butler theorises, and postcolonial feminist claims demonstrate, multicultural claims for recognition are neither universal nor particular, but intimately attach the affirmation of particularity to the rearticulation of national identity. The devil, as they say, is in the detail. So as much as I intend these two case studies to serve as support for my general argument, I also hope that they may illuminate some of the ways in which mis-interpellation functions for minorities and the different ways in which they rally against its call.

Notes 1 It is fair to say that this critique is overdrawn. Focusing on 18th-century British and German philosophical traditions, Carey and Trakulhun (2009) maintain that Enlightenment thought had more engagement with the question of diversity than is often presumed. Similarly, they argue that there is no necessary correlation

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between a universal narrative of history and human reason and a pro-colonial stance; indeed, a number of thinkers employed such tropes precisely to criticise colonial expansion. Perhaps the most notable critique of Butler’s conception of the universal comes from Martha Nussbaum (1999). However, as McKenzie (2009) points out, there are some striking parallels between Nussbaum’s approach to universality and Butler’s, particularly in her later work. Broadly speaking, radical democracy occupies a space between the traditional socialist concern with redistribution and the post-structuralist incentive to attend to the proliferation of difference. Note the striking parallels with the recognition-theoretic perspective. This is the reason why pure particularism is so self-defeating. Butler notes that translation can, of course, ‘work in full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion’, particularly when it ‘becomes an instrument through which dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordinated (pp. 35–6). However, dismissing translation because of this potential represents ‘a limited view of colonialism, one which assumed that the colonised emerges as a subject according to norms that are recognisably Eurocentric’. This ideological path is very strongly linked to the Anglo-American normative model of feminist progress, which steps through the various phases of liberal, Marxist, radical and lastly, socialist feminism. It is important to note that the typical second-wave story has been critiqued for its (re)centralising of white women (Sandoval, 2003). For instance, it is telling that despite the fact that women of colour, black women and Third World women participated in feminist struggles throughout the second wave, their contributions were not acknowledged until the latter period of the second wave when white women began to confront and debate the issues of difference (Thompson, 2002). The third wave is also used to refer to the generational gaps of feminism, and in particular how it has been adopted by younger women. In the Bourdieuian sense, the word ‘doxa’ signifies what is taken for granted in any particular society. According to Bourdieu, the doxa is the experience by which ‘the natural and social world appears self-evident’ and it ‘goes without saying because it comes without saying’ (1977: 164, 169). It is important to note that these critiques have also been made of postcolonial feminists. Sara Suleri (1992), for instance, has argued that some postcolonial feminist work has also indulged in the faulty romanticisation and fetishisation of difference, most often when lived experience is valorised in terms of knowledge production. The notion that it is women who maintain the ‘purity of tradition’ is indicative not just of the selective labelling of culture (and its imbrications with patriarchal control), but also establishes highly gender-specific conceptions of the ‘culture traitor’ – clearly a concern for Third World feminists whose feminism risks being disregarded as Western and therefore culturally traitorous. Liberal feminists fearful that women were disproportionately wearing the internal burdens of group accommodation raised some of the earliest critiques of multiculturalism. Susan Moller Okin’s famous essay ‘Is multiculturalism bad for women?’ (1999), for example, questioned the gendered nature of multicultural policies. Okin (in)famously answers her question in the affirmative, pointing to the ways in which various minority cultures subordinate and oppress women. Minority women, she ultimately suggests, may be ‘better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct … or, preferably, be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women’. Likewise, Martha Nussbam (1999) adopts a similar perspective in highlighting the ways that cultural traditions are often ‘obstacles to women’s flourishing’, and is equally concerned that the

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particularity of cultural difference undermines universal claims to women’s equality. Both Okin and Nussbaum, however, have been vigorously critiqued for the presumptions underlying their respective accounts. Indeed, in laying out cultural justice/sexual justice as a choice ‘between your culture and your rights’, thereby placing feminism in direct opposition to multiculturalism, Okin and Nussbaum seem to fall into the same presumptions that sustain the ‘culture card’ narrative. 14 Again, Hage (1998) makes it clear that his focus is on the dynamics of white nationalism and governmental belonging. However, I feel that my critique is in keeping with the general conclusions he seems to draw or at the very least with common interpretations of his work.

References Ahmed, S. (2000) ‘Boundaries and connections: Introduction’. In S. Ahmed, J. Kilby, C. Lury, M. McNeil and B. Skeggs (eds), Transformations: Thinking through feminism (pp. 111–118). London: Routledge. Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso. Ang, I. (2003) ‘I’m a feminist but … “Other” women and postnational feminism’. In R. Lewis and S. Mills (eds), Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader (pp. 57–73). New York: Routledge. Armstrong, J.A. (1982) Nations before nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (2007) Post-colonial studies: The key concepts, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Balibar, E. (2002) Politics and the other scene. London: Verso. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital’. In J. G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press. Bracke, S. (2011) ‘Subjects of debate: Secular and sexual exceptionalism, and Muslim women in the Netherlands’. Feminist Review 98: 28–46. BraidottiR. (1991) Patterns of dissonance: A study of women in contemporary philosophy. Cambridge: Polity. Bulbeck, C. (1998) Re-orienting western feminisms: Women’s diversity in a postcolonial world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1992) ‘Contingent foundations’. In J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds), Feminists theorise the political (pp. 3–21). London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004a) ‘Judith Butler: Reanimating the social’. In N. Gane (ed.), Future of social theory (pp. 47–76). London: Continuum. Butler, J. (2004b) Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, J., Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. (2000) Contingency, hegemony, universality: Contemporary dialogues on the left. London: Verso.

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Carby, H.V. (1997) ‘White women listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’. In H.S. Mirza (ed.), Black British feminism (pp. 45–53). London: Routledge. Carey, D. and Trakulhun, S. (2009) ‘Universalism, diversity and the postcolonial enlightenment’. In D. Carey and L. Festa (eds), Postcolonial enlightenment (pp. 240–280). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chambers, C. and Watkins, S. (2012) ‘Postcolonial feminism?’ Commonwealth Journal of Literature 47(3): 297–301. Chow, R. (1991) ‘Violence in the other country: China as crisis, spectacle, woman’. In C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds), Third World women and the politics of feminism (pp. 81–100). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’. Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299. Dean, J. (1996) Solidarity of strangers: Feminism after identity politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eisenberg, A. (2010) ‘Multiculturalism, gender and justice’. In D. Ivison (ed.), The Ashgate research companion to multiculturalism (pp. 119–140). Farnham: Ashgate. Eisenstein, H. (1985) The future of difference. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Felski, R. (1997) ‘The doxa of difference’. Signs 23(1): 1–21. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and J. Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Hage, G. (1998) White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Annandale: Pluto Press. Hage, G. (2008) ‘Analysing multiculturalism today’. In T. Bennett and J. Frow (eds), The Sage handbook of cultural analysis (pp. 488–509). London: Sage. Hage, G. (2010) ‘The affective politics of mis-interpellation’. Theory, Culture and Society 27(7–8): 112–129. Herzfeld, M. (1997) Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. New York: Routledge. Honneth, A. (1995) The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts, trans. J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Honneth, A. (2012) The I in we: Studies in the theory of recognition, trans. J. Ganahl. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jackson Lears, T.J. (1985) ‘The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and possibilities’. American Historical Review 90(3): 567–593. Jaggar, A.M. (1988) Feminist politics and human nature. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Jalalzai, Z. (2002) ‘Trading French and postcolonial feminisms: Spivak’s ethics of exchange’. Literature and Psychology 48(4): 33–46. Jusdanis, G. (2001) The necessary nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kinser, A. (2004) ‘Negotiating spaces for/through third-wave feminism’. NWSA Journal 16(3): 124–153. Laclau, E. (1995) ‘Universalism, particularism, and the question of identity’. In J. Rajchman (ed.), The identity in question (pp. 176–189). New York: Routledge. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics, trans. W. Moore and P. Cammack. London: Verso.

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Lewis, R. and Mills, S. (2003) ‘Introduction’. In R. Lewis and S. Mills (eds.) Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader (pp. 1–21). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial conquest. New York: Routledge. McKenzie, J. (2009) ‘Refiguring universalism’. Australian Feminist Studies 24(61): 343–358. Mohanty, C.T. (1985) ‘Under Western eyes: Scholarship and colonial discourses’. boundary 2 2(3): 333–358. Mohanty, C.T. (1991) ‘Cartographies of struggle: Third World women and the politics of feminism’. In C.T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Toures (eds), Third World women and the politics of feminism (pp. 1–47). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, C.T. (2003) Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mouffe, C. (2005) On the political. London: Routledge. Narayan, U. (1997) Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions and Third-World feminism. New York: Routledge. Narayan, U. (2000a) ‘Essence of culture and a sense of history: A feminist critique of cultural essentialism’. In U. Narayan and S. Harding (eds), Decentring the centre: Philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world (pp. 80–100). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Narayan, U. (2000b) ‘Undoing the “package picture” of cultures’. Signs 25(4): 1083–1086. Nussbaum, M.C. (1992) ‘Human functioning and social justice: In defense of Aristotelian essentialism’. Political Theory 20(2): 202–246. Nussbaum, M.C. (1999) Sex and social justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okin, S.M. (1999) ‘Is multiculturalism bad for women?’ In J. Cohen, M. Howard and M.C. Nussbaum (eds), Is multiculturalism bad for women? (pp. 7–26). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Phillips, A. (2010) Gender and culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Puar, J. (2007) Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rich, A. (2003) ‘Notes towards a politics of location’. In R. Lewis and S. Mills (eds), Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader (pp. 29–42). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ryan, B. (1992) Feminism and the women’s movement: Dynamics of change in social movement ideology and activism. New York: Routledge. Sandoval, C. (2003) ‘US Third-World feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world’. In R. Lewis and S. Mills (eds), Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader (pp. 75–99). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schott, R.M. (1996) ‘The gender of enlightenment’. In J. Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth century answers and twentieth century questions (pp. 471–487). Berkeley: University of California Press. Schutte, O. (2000) ‘Cultural alterity: Cross-cultural communication and feminist theory in north-south contexts’. In U. Narayan and S. Harding (eds), Decentring the centre: Philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world (pp. 47–66). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scott, J.W. (1996) Only paradoxes to offer: French feminists and the rights of man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shachar, A. (2000) ‘On citizenship and multicultural vulnerability’. Political Theory 28(1): 64–89.

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Showalter, E. (1986) ‘Towards a feminist poetics’. In E. Showalter (ed.), The new feminist criticism: Essays on women, literature and theory (pp. 125–143). London: Virago Press. Spelman, E.V. (1988) Inessential woman: Problems of exclusion in feminist thought. London: Women’s Press. Spivak, G.C. (1981) ‘French feminism in an international frame’. Yale French Studies 62: 154–184. Spivak, G.C. (1990) The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues, ed. S. Harasym. New York: Routledge. Spivak, G.C. (1991) ‘Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism’. In R.R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl (eds), Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism (pp. 798–814). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Spivak, G.C. (1992) ‘French feminism revisited: Ethics and politics’. In J. Butler and J. W. Scott (eds), Feminist theorise the political (pp. 54–87). London: Routledge. Stoler, A.L. (2002) Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Suleri, S. (1992) ‘Woman skin deep: Feminism and the postcolonial condition’. Critical Inquiry 18(4): 756–769. Sunder Rajan, R. and Park, Y. (2005) ‘Postcolonial feminism/postcolonialism and feminism’. In H. Schwarz and S. Ray (eds), A companion to postcolonial studies (pp. 53–71). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Thompson, B. (2002) ‘Multiracial feminism: Recasting the chronology of second-wave feminism’. Feminist Studies 28(2): 337–360. Trinh, T.M. (1998) Woman, native, other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Volpp, L. (1994) ‘(Mis)identifying culture: Asian women and the “cultural defense”’. Harvard Women’s Law Journal 54: 57–80. Walby, S. (2000) ‘Beyond the politics of location: The power of argument in a global era’. Feminist Theory 1(2): 189–206. Walzer, M. (1989) ‘Nation and universe’. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Brasenose College, Oxford University, 1 and 8 May. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_ documents/a-to-z/w/walzer90.pdf (accessed 19 January 2017). Weedon, C. (1999) Feminism, theory and the politics of difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, I.M. (1994) ‘Gender as seriality: Thinking about women as a social collective’. Signs 19(3): 713–738. Young, R.J.C. (1990) White mythologies: Writing history and the West. London: Routledge.

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Beyond clashing civilisations Muslim revisions of recognition in popular culture

The communication lecturer, who was there, blurted out that infamous remark: ‘When I go to Morocco and I go into a Mosque, I take off my shoes, so you can take off your veil!’ I am so used to hearing this remark that I quickly respond, ‘Good for you, but excuse me, I am French, I have my rights and you cannot deny them’. (Chouder et al., 2008: 119, cited in Lentin, 2014: 1276)

On 11 December 2005, some 5,000 white Australians converged on Cronulla beach in Sydney’s southern suburbs in what was to become one of the nation’s most shocking race riots. The widely advertised ‘Leb and Wog bashing day’1 was a reaction to an incident on the beach a week prior, in which a verbal confrontation between two off-duty surf lifesavers and four young Lebanese men culminated in a physical assault where one of the lifesavers fell and badly injured his head. In an effort to ‘show them this is our beach and they’re never welcome back’,2 the day started as a festival of sorts with nationalistic pride as the centrepiece. Attendees came draped in and painted with Australian flags, there were shared picnics and barbeques (‘Free snags: No tabouli’), t-shirts, flesh and placards were adorned with a variety of slogans: ‘wog free zone’, ‘respect the locals or piss off!’, ‘save ‘nulla, fuck Allah’ and, perhaps the most enduring of all, ‘we grew here, you flew here’. The day erupted into immense violence in the early afternoon, with the crowd attacking anyone of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance. People were hit by beer bottles, others had sausages thrown at them. Dark-skinned people were cornered in trains, restaurants and pubs by mobs shouting ‘fuck off Lebs!’ By the end of the day, 26 people had been injured and 16 arrested; retaliatory attacks by Lebanese-Australians were initiated that evening and smaller riots occurred across other Sydney suburbs in the immediate days after the event. Shortly thereafter, the ruling conservative Liberal-National coalition government began a series of public and media engagements to promote a future Australian citizenship test. In February 2006, federal treasurer Peter Costello delivered a speech to the Sydney Institute on Australian citizenship (2006c), followed by a number of radio interviews with prominent Sydney journalists. Costello underscored the government’s commitment to ensuring that

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immigrants embrace ‘Australian values’ in order to qualify for citizenship, namely ‘loyalty to the country, respect for the rights and liberties of others, a belief in democratic Government and respect for the law’ (2006b). While praising the country’s history as a nation of immigrants, Costello articulated a general failure of integration, which he called ‘mushy multiculturalism’: the kind of multiculturalism that says it’s important for migrants coming to Australia to retain the love of the country of their origin and their culture and their language, but it makes no demand on such people to show a similar loyalty or a higher loyalty I would argue to Australia and its people. (2006a) Pledging loyalty to Australian values ought to be the defining requirement of acquiring citizenship for new immigrants and keeping citizenship for those with dually held citizenship elsewhere. ‘If you go to a mosque you will be asked to take your shoes off … as a sign of respect’, Costello (2006b) explains. ‘Now if you don’t want to take your shoes off then don’t go to the mosque’ (my emphasis). The problem with mushy multiculturalism, for Costello, is that it has allowed people to enter the mosque and keep their shoes on so to speak, resulting in a number of Australian citizens, but specifically second-generation immigrants from the Middle East, ‘living in a twilight zone where they have left the values of the old country but … haven’t embraced the new ones’ (2006a). On 11 December 2006, one year to the day after the Cronulla Riots, the government announced its intention to introduce an Australian citizenship test, which was officially implemented on 1 October 2007 with a strong emphasis on Australian values.3 I begin with these two vignettes because they illustrate very well the multidimensions of Muslim misrecognition in Australia. As a small minority of only 2.2 per cent of the population (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2011), 4 the Australian Muslim community is remarkably culturally and ethnically diverse: while the largest groups are respectively Lebanese and Turkish, Australian Muslims hail from a variety of countries including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, South Africa and Saudi Arabia (Kabir, 2010). The predominant place of birth for Australian Muslims, however, is Australia, with 40 per cent born locally (ABS, 2011). These sociological realities are for the most part eclipsed in popular representations of Muslim difference. For all the slippages between ‘Muslim’, ‘Middle Eastern’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Lebanese’ that characterise Australian discourse (the latter a distinctive peculiarity of the Australian context), Muslims are regularly presented as a relatively homogenous collective framed through the prism of Islamic terrorism and security threat (Poynting et al., 2004). As is the case in much of the Western world, anxieties over multiculturalism in Australia are not so much general as they are directly connected to Muslim immigration and fears of terrorism

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(Ivison, 2010: 14), so much so that Islam is commonly portrayed as defining the limits of the Australian multicultural imaginary. As is evident from the two vignettes above, there is an important national dimension where Muslims are depicted as incompatible with multiculturalism, but also with the ‘Australian way of life’ more broadly. Whether explicitly and violently as in the case of Cronulla, or coded in more sophisticated language like Costello’s ruminations on Australian citizenship, the implication is that Muslims belong somewhere ‘not-Australia’ (Perera, 2002) – and while this can be done in a variety of ways, the most common (and perhaps most effective) is through underscoring the Anglo-ness of Australian national identity. If this is unequivocal in the white men wielding beer bottles who converged on Cronulla’s beaches, it is relevant to note that the Australian citizenship test, even if it followed international developments in places like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, was at least historically reminiscent of the test that preceded it as part of the White Australia policy (Reynolds, 2007: 67). This chapter explores the ways in which national and nationalist dimensions of misrecognition play out in Muslim appeals for recognition in contemporary Australia. In order to do so, I engage Muslim Australian popular culture as a site from which to analyse how ‘Muslim’ and ‘Australian’ identities, and the relationships between them, are performed, contested and rearticulated in claims for recognition. This is not to suggest that cultural interventions are the only, or even the most important, struggles facing Muslim communities in Australia today. Certainly, some of the most urgent issues affecting Muslim Australians are connected to very material concerns (permits to build mosques and Islamic schools, for instance) and there is a faith dimension to Muslim recognition that raises critical questions concerning what makes for genuine accommodation of religious minorities in officially secular contexts.5 Given, however, the seeming entrenchment of negative stereotypes of Muslims in the media and cultural artefacts like films and television programmes, as well as the relative ignorance of mainstream Australia who for the most part obtain their knowledge of Islam through such avenues (Pratt, 2011), popular culture plays a significant role in the struggle for recognition. Not only is it exceedingly powerful in the production of national identity in everyday life (Edensor, 2002), but popular culture also serves as a pertinent site for the dissemination and construction of political knowledge and morality (Street et al., 2011), with important implications for citizenship (van Zoonen, 2005). In recent years, but especially since the New York terrorist attacks in September 2001, Muslims of a variety of backgrounds and different levels of religiosity have come to occupy a more visible space in Australian arts, culture and media, driven by the desire for selfrepresentation in a context saturated by negative imagery of Muslims and Islam (Abdel-Fattah, 2008 in Stephenson, 2010: 11). Literary works like Hanifa Deen’s Caravanserai (2003) and Randa Abdel-Fattah’s (2005) Does my head look big in this? for instance have aimed to draw a more human and less reductive vision of Muslims and the place of Islam in Australia. Similar

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cultural and media interventions have likewise sought a more plural field of public representation, engaging in a different form of advocacy than the type traditionally pursued by community organisations. My particular focus is two productions which were amongst the first to reach a wider Australian public: the television programme Salam Café, which aired nationally in 2008 to great fanfare, and the comedy show Fear of a Brown Planet, which debuted in 2008 with a follow-up in 2010. While the close connections between recognition and representation have led some scholars to approach all politics of recognition as politics of representation (e.g. Thomassen, 2011), what is interesting about both Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet is their eschewing of representative status. Neither production claims to represent the Muslim community in Australia. In fact, they take advantage of the performative aspects of cultural interventions to play on and with dominant images, meanings and ideas of Muslim difference in order to circumvent demand for fixed or authoritative representations. As I seek to show, an important component of both is to dislodge the partialities of a white Anglo conception of Australia and its concomitant exclusion of Muslims as well as other marginalised and minority communities. In some ways they could not take a more different approach to this task: Salam Café is a normalising and eminently liberal intervention whereas Fear of a Brown Planet is confrontational and combative. Nevertheless, both are invested in a vocabulary of nation which, on the one hand, is indelibly bound up in the dynamics of misrecognition they elucidate and, on the other hand, situates their claims for recognition, providing a space through which they appeal to difference and commonality. In this regard, and as is my main argument in the chapter, both productions approach Muslim recognition through a framework that holds the Australian ‘we’ equally to scrutiny, presenting the nation not as something taken-for-granted into which difference can ‘assimilate’ or ‘integrate’, but rather as a contingent, fluid category that empowers and is the site of political contestation. This move is particularly pertinent because it refuses the reductive dichotomy of West/Islam and the overdrawn framework of ‘clashing civilisations’ (Huntington, 1996). It furthermore reminds us, like the quote from Chouder et al. (in Lentin, 2014: 1278) at the beginning of this chapter indicates, that assertions of common nationality are not merely about demanding rights as it were. Rather, in claiming national belonging and cultural difference, Muslims assert their right to shape multicultural politics and ideas of political community in Australia.

Misrecognition between the transnational and the national If there is an important relationship between misrecognition and conceptions of nation, Muslim minorities in the West would seem to be both the best and worst place to start. Best, because present-day regimes of Muslim misrecognition are bound up with contemporary expressions of nationalism;

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worst, because Muslim misrecognition extends in a very significant way beyond the national into the realm of the transnational. There is no accounting for the unique place accorded to ‘the Muslim’ in contemporary multicultural imaginaries without paying heed to both the transnational dimensions of ‘Muslim difference’ and the wider geopolitical imaginaries that shape representations of ‘the West’ and ‘its Others’. The example of Reclaim Australia we considered in Chapter 1 makes this powerfully evident. On the one hand, it is impossible to extricate their platform from a generalised anxiety about Islamic terrorism and its naturalisation of the West/Islam divide as a potent frame of contemporary speech and imagination (Bracke, 2011). On the other hand, it is apparent that Reclaim Australia, for all its purported patriotism, is heavily invested in a larger imaginary in which Australia, as a part of the West, faces off against a threatening Muslim alterity. The Australian identity they seek to ‘reclaim’ is deeply entangled with ideas of Western cultural and political difference, shored up with appeals to ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. In this regard, as much as Reclaim Australia is a nationalist movement which presents itself as defending the Australian nation, it is also importantly invested in a transnational political vocabulary, perhaps most clearly evidenced in its proud association with the far-right anti-Islam German organisation PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) (Sydow, 2015). To enter the terrain of Muslim misrecognition is thus to enter a space in which not only cultural difference, but the representation of cultural difference too, ‘is highly politicised and comes in large geo-political packages’ (Mamdani, 2004: 17). This has been widely noted in scholarship on Muslims in Australia, which has focused on the ways in which the regimes of representation that make such depictions possible have their roots in Orientalist discourses and the practices of Western (neo)colonialism (e.g. Akbarzadeh and Yasmeen, 2005). As a discourse that served to maintain a dichotomous relationship between colonisers and colonised as Self and Other, Orientalism generally features the Orient as the lesser other of the West. The Westerner is imagined as rational, progressive, modern and virtuous; the Oriental is irrational, backward, traditional and depraved (Said, 2003: 40). ‘For much of its history,’ Edward Said asserts, Orientalism has carried ‘within it the stamp of a problematic attitude towards Islam’ (p. 74), with Islam typically standing in as the West’s ultimate Other – the West is what Islam is not, and vice versa. There is a striking regularity to Western depictions of Muslim and Islam (whether in Reclaim or PEGIDA), and time and time again we stumble across the same set of stereotypes used to designate Muslim difference: ‘veiled women, fierce bearded men, barbaric parents, rapists and suicide bombers’ (Deen, 2003: 285).6 Similarly, there is a strong international dimension to Muslim misrecognition, insofar as waves of vilification and racial violence are connected to global political events. As Nahid Kabir (2010) documents, with Australia’s close relationship with its ally the United States, international events have

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played an important role in prejudice directed towards Muslims since the 1970s, when the country began to receive large numbers of Muslim immigrants from Lebanon and Turkey. For instance, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Salman Rushdie Satanic Versus controversy of 1989 both saw a predictable rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in Australian media and popular discourse. Australia’s involvement in the 1990/1 Gulf War, however, marked a particular shift in anti-Muslim prejudice with Muslims vilified as the ‘enemy within’, physically attacked and verbally assaulted in the streets (including women’s hijabs being torn off) and mosques were vandalised and sent hate mail. It also fashioned a political divide between Australia’s Muslim and nonMuslim communities, with many Muslims critical of the country’s decision to send troops to the Gulf (Kabir, 2010: 210). The 1991 National Inquiry into Racist Violence conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) identified Muslims as one of the most vilified groups in Australian society (alongside Aboriginals, Asians and Jews), locating anti-Muslim sentiment in: a generalised identification of Arabs and Muslims with violence (such as terrorism and the taking of hostages), stereotyped identification of Arabs and Muslims with ‘un-Australian values’ (for example, religious fundamentalism, conservative views about women and moral issues, dietary restrictions, conservative and conspicuous clothing). (HREOC, 1991) These stereotypes, in particular the equation of Islam with terrorism, became entrenched in dominant representations of Muslims in Australia throughout the 1990s, coming to a head with the September 11 terrorist attacks and the closer-tohome Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005 (the former killed some 202 people, 88 of whom were Australian). All of this saw Gulf War dynamics of vilification and harassment replicated with alarming frequency and striking regularity. There is accordingly an easy and understandable temptation to read the dynamics of Muslim misrecognition in broad transnational swaths as embedded in the desires, ‘projections, doublings, idealisations and rejections’ of a ‘Western consciousness’ that needs an Islamic Other against which to define itself (Clifford, 1988: 272) or, alternatively, shaped by reigning geopolitical interests. Indeed, Said (2003: xv) seems to indicate that the two slot together: ‘without a well-organised sense that these people over there were not like “us” and didn’t appreciate “our” values,’ he writes, ‘there would have been no war’ in Iraq. As much as the misrecognition of Muslim minorities in Western contexts cannot be understood without a wider sense of the transnational (or better, perhaps, the investments of the national in the transnational and vice versa), there is a risk that the Orientalist analytical prism ontologises the same ‘falsely unifying rubrics’ (Said, 2003: xxii) it sets out to critique – resulting in a singular and ahistorical picture of the West, Islam and Orientalist discourse itself (Breckenridge and van der Heer, 1993: 5).

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Moreover, it misses out on the ways in which concrete history and experience fill out the specific contours of misrecognition. In Australia, Muslim communities are particularly disadvantaged in the labour market, with an unemployment rate significantly higher than the national average,7 widely considered to be due to racial and religious prejudice as well as the poor English language skills of Lebanese and Turkish communities on arrival (Kabir, 2010: 169). In addition, a number of Australian politicians have been charged with ‘dog whistling’, or indeed direct flaming of moral panic, when it comes to Muslim-related politics, taking advantage of local events for political gain. Many of these have been connected to the Lebanese Muslim community and occurred in Sydney, where the largest proportion of Lebanese Muslims (many of whom were from the relatively poor northern city of Tripoli) fleeing the Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s settled. For instance, the 1998 shooting attack on a police station in Lakemba, a Sydney suburb well known for its strong Lebanese presence, saw the development of a public moral panic regarding criminal Lebanese youth gangs, fostered by the then New South Wales premier Bob Carr who promoted the idea of an inherent Lebanese criminality – Carr went on to win the election in 1999 (Kabir, 2010: 288).8 Perhaps the most enduring in terms of political effects, however, was the Tampa incident in 2001 where the government decided to deny 438, mainly Afghan, asylum seekers on a sinking boat access to Australian waters, instead sending them back to Indonesia, the nearest point of which was nearly four times as far away (Marr and Wilkinson, 2003: 240). Then prime minister John Howard’s skilful manoeuvring of public fears of terrorism and refugees as likely terrorists not only won him the federal election that year, but his famous declaration that ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ would also come to define Australian border policy.9 The impacts of the combination of socio-economic inequality and political manipulation of anti-Muslim sentiment for the particular prejudice and discrimination Muslims face in Australia cannot be underestimated. It is equally important to acknowledge that Australia historically has a different relationship to Islam than does Europe or the United States. Orientalist stereotypes of the type Said (1981: xxix) documents were born in Europe and later in the United States: the former due to the proximity of Islam as a real civilisational competitor; the latter due to the geopolitics of American post-World War Two global ascendency. Of course, similar attitudes to Islam and Muslims had migrated into Australian discourse through the global media and Hollywood well before the first Gulf War (e.g. Ata, 1984; Brasted, 2001). Nonetheless, and despite Australia’s close proximity to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, it is prudent to recall that the preeminent Other in Australia has historically been Asia. Anti-Chinese riots in gold-mining towns in the 19th century and the early 20th century centred on moral panic concerning the so-called ‘Yellow Peril’ (Walker, 1999). Certainly, Asian immigration was until only relatively recently the primary anxiety in

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the Australian imagination and the focus of anti-multiculturalists. Whereas the far-right nationalist politician Pauline Hanson of the One Nation party is now almost exclusively focused on Muslims, her mandate in the 1990s was against ‘Asians forming ghettos and not assimilating’. This concern appears antiquated now, especially given the entrenching of Asian cultural influence in the some 20 years since and the dawning of the so-called ‘Asian century’ in Australian policy initiatives. It is further significant to point out that Australian multicultural imaginaries are themselves popularly embedded in the so-called ‘waves of immigration’ thesis, which points to the ways in which a number of different ethnic communities have been subject to racism and marginalisation and constructed as incompatible with the national identity at various stages of Australian immigration history (Greeks and Italians in the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnamese in the 1980s, for example). This liberal multicultural logic proposes that episodes of focused racist attention are tied to the numbers and relative newness of a certain group’s presence. According to this thesis, Muslims are just one group among whose time in the spotlight will come to pass. Of course, common-sense logics mask relations of privilege, and it is no coincidence that the ‘waves of immigration’ thesis implicitly posits white Australians as welcoming and generous once a minority group has sufficiently ‘proved’ itself. Nevertheless, the salient thing about this narrative is that Australian multicultural imaginations are not necessarily geared towards perceiving the othering of Muslims as more than just a ‘phase’, which, for all its problematic implications, is at least a popular acknowledgement of the contingency of such moral panic. Along these lines, there are also a number of well-known historical tropes concerning the long-term presence of Islam in Australia (the role of Afghan cameleers in opening up Australia’s vast desert hinterland, for instance, or Malay pearl divers on the northern coast), which are commonly appealed to by Muslim community advocates. There are significant historical, social, economic and political differences between respective waves of immigration. The local conditions facing Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s, for instance, were evidently quite different to those confronting Muslim communities at present, particularly in terms of securitisation of immigration and breathless advances in surveillance, identification and mapping technologies. It is thus important to engage the ways in which the reconfiguration of multiculturalism in terms of national security that has taken place over the last 15 years or so has, in many ways, positioned Muslims uniquely as not simply an ethnic group unwilling to assimilate, but rather one that desires to both attack the nation (the terrorist spectre) and fundamentally transform it (the populist fear of Shari’a). From this perspective, Muslim cultural difference is seen less as ‘an expression of diversity and different origins’ than one of ‘cultural resistance’ (Humphrey, 2010: 214). According to Michael Humphrey, ‘the politicisation of Islam as a source of danger, political extremism and violence’ has not only exacerbated the social and cultural marginalisation of Muslims, but also constructed them as the

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objects of political management and discipline framed by the twin logics of securitisation and domestication. These logics position Muslim difference in a complex space of inclusion/exclusion, where exclusion arises less through explicit othering than through making inclusion conditional on certain agreements. Borrowing from Jef Huysmans (2006: xi), securitisation is a: political and normative practice of representing policy questions in an existential modality … It is a political technique of framing policy questions in logics of survival with a capacity to mobilise politics of fear in which social relations are structured on relations of distrust. Significantly, securitisation is less about whether, or to what degree, groups pose an imagined or actual threat, but rather is a ‘particular way of arranging social and political relations’ with antagonism prefigured as the main relational mode (Huysmans, 2006: xxi). Muslim difference is thus constructed as inherently antagonistic and threatening, an object to be kept in check, watched over and policed. The flip-side of securitisation is domestication. Domestication refers to the ‘state management of social and cultural difference with the purpose of defining limits with respect to national values and culture’ (Bowen, 2004). As a logic that ‘seeks to redefine the cultural parameters of citizenship’ (Humphrey, 2010: 200), domestication is an extension of the notion that Muslim difference must be managed and its ‘inclusion’ subject to conditions. Of course, this is not a new logic nor is it exclusive to Muslim communities. Critical multiculturalist literature has shown that immigrants and minority groups are always positioned in spaces of conditionality, where they must be willing to play the ‘rules of the game’ in order to qualify for the benefits of citizenship: the migrant is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ dependent on their acceptance of this condition. As Sara Ahmed (2010: 138) frames it, multiculturalism can only ‘deliver on its social promise by extending freedom to migrants on the condition that they embrace its game’ (my emphasis). However, the inevitable element of religion makes this game of conditionality somewhat more charged in relation to Muslim difference, which is commonly portrayed ‘sociologically “out of control”’ (Pratt, 2011: 384). While a number of Muslim Australians would be considered cultural Muslims, for the deeply religious, all laws – including those of the state – are secondary to those of God, and with a ‘substantial and increasing number of profoundly religious people’ in the Muslim community the concern is not that they refuse to join the game, but that they do not recognise it at all (Hage, 2010: 241). What is striking is how both logics are heavily invested in imaginaries of nation, in that they seek to contain the challenges that Islam as a global religious force and Muslimness as a transnational identity (the Islamic Ummah) pose to the Western national project (Humphrey, 2010: 199–200). As Wendy Brown (2010) has argued in relation to the near global obsession with controlling and fortifying borders, transnational forces undermine and

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threaten state claims to be the sovereign power in a given territory. In such a context, the rubric of nation takes on a particular rhetorical importance, providing the motif through which states can mobilise their attempts to shore up sovereignty; the twin logics of securitisation and domestication may be read in such terms. In presenting the nation as something that requires protection, securitisation corporealises the nation as a living entity at risk of harm, injury or even death; the doctrine of security can thus be read as enlivening the national project. Domestication, likewise, seeks for Muslims to prioritise the nation in their identities and self-conceptions, and political loyalty is demanded in an attempt to shore up the nation-state as the primary object of identification. The implication here is that the Muslim can either be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and that their recognition is tethered to this distinction. As Mahmoud Mamdani (2004) suggests, the ‘good Muslim’ is the ‘moderate Muslim’ and the ‘bad Muslim’ the ‘radical Muslim’. Furthermore, the ‘moderate’ Muslim is the ‘national’ Muslim who follows a ‘national Islam’, much like former French president Nikolas Sarkozy’s injunction for French Muslims ‘to be Muslims of France practicing an Islam of France’ (Bowen, 2004: 43). The coalescence of securitisation and domestication logics points powerfully towards the salience of the national-transnational nexus in Muslim experiences of misrecognition in contemporary Australia. While research has suggested that many Muslims, particularly younger generations, do not see their Muslim and Australian identities as incompatible with each other (e.g. Woodlock, 2011), we can nevertheless speculate that, at least discursively, the particular imaginaries of nation these logics produce exacerbate the experience of mis-interpellation we considered in Chapter 4. By calling Muslims to the nation, domestication reminds them that they are not part of everyone; in demanding that Muslims be nationals, it tells them that they are not. This complex alienation from the imagined national community, and the particular experience of social disrespect and injury of which it is productive, is something that has been acknowledged in community policing efforts (e.g. Four Corners, Dangerous Ground, 2008) and, more recently, anti- and deradicalisation measures as part of counter-terrorism initiatives. The ways in which the nation functions as a trope for both inclusion and exclusion ought to make us wary of simply arguing for Muslim ‘national integration’ or the ‘compatibility’ of Muslim and national identities. Nonetheless, I want to show that the increasing politicisation of the position of Muslims in the Australian nation affords a critical resource in Muslim claims for recognition as expressed in the arts, culture and media. Before we come to this, however, let us consider popular culture, and popular culture in Australia, in more detail.

Popular culture, nation and the politics of recognition It is fair to say that popular culture is rarely seen as ‘political’ in the same sense as policy, law or community advocacy are understood to be political.

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Broadly referring to ‘texts, productions, interventions and utterances’ encompassing mediums like television, film, the internet, music and comic books (Bowman, 2008: 6), conventional understandings tell us that popular culture is mass produced, distributed widely and consumed by large numbers of people. Alternatively, they tell us that popular culture is ‘popular’ because it does not require particular skills or knowledge for its enjoyment (Street, 1997: 7, 8). In this sense, popular culture is located in the realm of the mundane and the everyday, more often than not used to indicate that which is ‘gross, base, vile, riffraff, common, low, vulgar, plebian and cheap’ (Fiske, 1990: 323) in contrast to official or ‘high’ culture like theatre, opera and classical music. Nevertheless, it is precisely the definition of popular culture in opposition to official culture that reveals its imbrications in politics and the political. Popular culture’s conceptual fuzziness means that it only ever makes sense defined against high culture. Yet, the distinction between the two is fundamentally bound up in questions of social taste, class and public accessibility, and always carries a value judgement on the worth of particular cultures and cultural artefacts. As John Street (1997: 8) asserts, ‘all definitions of popular culture encode a set of political judgments or, if acted upon, a set of political consequences’. Traditionally speaking, there are two broad ways of approaching the politics of popular culture, which Stuart Hall (1998: 443) calls the containment/ resistance distinction. On the one hand, there are those who see popular culture, especially in its mass-media variants, as a site of manipulation and domination where official ideologies are handed down to a deceived audience. This cynical view of popular culture is perhaps exemplified most famously in the work of the Frankfurt School, for whom popular culture (what they called the ‘culture industries’) plays a central role in the ideological legitimation of capitalism: mass-mediated culture disseminates dominant ideologies, integrates consumers into the capitalist system and mediates reality in the interests of power so as to reduce the possibilities of opposition and thus social change. On the other hand, there are those who celebrate popular culture as a space of resistance against the hegemony of elite and official culture. Because it is grounded in ‘the experiences, the pleasures, the memories, the traditions of the people … the everyday practices and everyday experiences of ordinary folks’ (Hall, 1993: 107), popular culture is seen as a means through which the lower classes speak up against, critique and subvert elite ideologies and interests. Of course, the reality sits somewhere in the middle. Neither pole is adequate: the containment approach, for instance, presents the masses as passive dupes whereas the resistance approach ellipses the very real power inequalities that shape and pervade forms of popular culture, including the interests of capital (it also presumes that official and unofficial cultures are easily distinguished from one another). People engage with popular culture critically and uncritically, reflexively and unreflexively. As such it should neither be read as a site of inherent domination nor one of inherent subversion. Rather, as

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John Fiske (1990: 331) suggests, popular culture should be read as a potential space of creativity and transformation because it invites (though does not necessarily compel) critical textual engagement. For Fiske, the main differences between popular and official culture are ‘clustered around the status and uses of the text’. While high culture is read whole in the sense that individuals seek to understand it ‘as a text within its own terms’ (the struggle, for example, to comprehend an opera), popular culture is not ‘an object of reverence to be understood in all its coherence and completeness, but a resource to be used’. Put differently, there is a strong element of antagonism in the relationship between the popular cultural text and the reader, for the reader may take some meanings and discard others, appropriate them for their own purposes or read their own meanings into the text; the reader may make claims from or on the text, or radically revise its meanings and implications. It is in this regard that popular culture, as Iain Chambers (1986: 13) puts it, offers a ‘democratic prospect for appropriating and transforming everyday life’. On the one side, popular culture invites critical textual engagement; on the other side, it is a forum in which everyday life – including, importantly, political life – may be reflected upon, critiqued, resisted or re-enacted. In the contemporary world, popular culture is one of the key locations in which we communicate the stories and myths of our societies. These stories and myths communicate political ideals and principles. Popular stories have always been used to explain and enact societal philosophies, even if technological developments have changed the ways in which they are told (Foy, 2013: 2–3). They also give us a sense of who we are and our place in the world; that is to say, they interpellate us to particular identities. Popular culture is a particularly powerful site of interpellation because it is a site of pleasure and desire. We engage with it emotionally, while it in turn inspires and reflects powerful emotions in us. As Street (1997: 10) argues, ‘popular culture’s ability to produce and articulate feelings can become the basis of an identity, and that identity can be the source of political thought and action’. This is particularly relevant nowadays; the power of popular culture to mobilise support, focus passions and communicate a political vision of the world is not lost on activists and politicians – think of Barack Obama’s Facebook campaign or, more insidiously, Donald Trump’s use of Twitter. Moreover, ‘because of the way it offers forms of identity’, popular culture has a strong affinity with identity politics, in particular ‘the politics of citizenship, the right to belong and to be recognised’ (Street, 1997: 12). The pervasiveness of popular culture in everyday life makes it a powerful arena for the production and consumption of national meanings, mythologies, symbolisms and identities (Dittmer, 2005: 626). Popular culture is part of these embodied habits and taken-for-granted realities of everyday life, but it is also, importantly, a site in which nation and national identity may be purposely and consciously performed – which in itself has potential political implications. In popular culture, ‘we’ see ourselves performed to us and reflected on the screen or the stage, and that performance may confirm what we

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already know or it may shift or even transform conceptions of collectivity: what it is that makes ‘us’ us. Likewise, the meanings ascribed to national identity are the outcomes of a dialectical engagement between message and audience; as such, identity can never be fully settled. While some national mythologies and symbolisms resonate more than others, and there are particular ‘constellations around which cultural elements cohere’ (Edensor, 2002: vii), the performance of nation serves as a reminder that it is always open to rearticulation and reconstruction. Questions of nation and national identity have occupied significant attention in Australian popular culture, arguably propelled by the deep historical anxieties that Australia has felt over its status as an antipodean settler colony. Caught between negotiating a sense of inferiority in relation to the ‘motherland’ (almost British but not quite, as Homi Bhabha would put it) and the reality of Indigenous dispossession, articulating what is fundamentally ‘Australian’ has been vested with a great deal of social importance in the arts and media. The film funding boom of the 1970s, for example, was oriented towards establishing a distinctly Australian arts scene, which, in turn, would contribute to developing a sense of national uniqueness (see Lewis et al., 2006). More recently, the ways in which nation is engaged in popular culture continue to reveal the ambivalences of Australian national identity. By and large, mainstream Australian popular culture remains notoriously white (Phillips, 2012), although the era of multiculturalism has seen peripheral and more subversive cultural forms play a role in rearticulating national identity from a multicultural perspective. An example is the television network SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), the only public broadcaster with an official, and particularly sophisticated, multicultural mandate: an ‘ethnic-multiculturalism’ which provides original language programming; a ‘cosmopolitan-multiculturalism’ committed to the public promotion of multiculturalism; and a ‘popularmulticulturalism’ that treats cultural diversity as ‘an ordinary, taken-for-granted feature of everyday life’ (Ang et al., 2008: 20). Nevertheless, and despite the increasing number of Australian cultural productions similarly grounded in this last mandate of popular multiculturalism, the Anglo-centredness of mainstream popular culture is often apparent (Nicholls, 2011). This makes popular culture a powerful, albeit fraught, terrain for minorities. While there are now greater opportunities for minority actors to play roles that do not caricature or stigmatise their identity, historically speaking most representations of non-Anglo migrant groups have confirmed negative stereotypes, whether these have been produced by Anglos or non-Anglos themselves (Mitchell, 1992: 1). Even cultural productions geared towards giving minority groups a space from which to speak and be represented have had to tussle with the ambivalence of non-Anglo productions in an otherwise Anglo-dominated space. The comedy television show Acropolis Now from the late 1980s/early 1990s is a case in point. As the first ever Australian television comedy to foreground non-Anglo characters played by non-Anglo actors, Acropolis Now’s main protagonists were young Greek

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Australians struggling with the cultural pressures of their parents and communities and the dominant trends of Anglo-Australian culture (Mitchell, 1992: 7). Acropolis Now did important work in facilitating non-Anglo representation on Australian television (Phillips, 2012). Likewise, through making Anglos marginal characters, it played an important role in performing and reflecting back so-called ‘Australian’ identity. It was Acropolis Now’s stage predecessor Wogs out of Work, for instance, that was the first to use the term ‘Skip’ (from the 1970s television show Skippy: The Bush Kangaroo) to refer to Australians of Anglo descent. However, Acropolis Now relied on overexaggerated ‘wog’ stereotypes of Greeks and Italians in order to garner its mainstream success, with its writers suggesting that such caricatures were excusable based on the fact that the show kept ‘ethnics on television’ (Mitchell, 1992: 7). The commercial impetus behind this ‘wogsploitation industry’ was satirised by the early 1990s comedy sketch show The Late Show, where proclamations of ‘holding a mirror up to multicultural society’ and ‘breaking down ethnic barriers’ were juxtaposed with the cynicism of attaching business interests to tasteless ethnic stereotypes.10 It is in this broad context that Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet are situated. As two of the first Muslim cultural productions widely accessible to a mainstream Australian audience, their location of enunciation in the context of 9/11 and the War on Terror makes them as much political interventions as they are cultural. Both productions aimed at challenging the invisibility of Muslims in mainstream popular culture and the saturation of negative Muslim stereotypes in the media – a task they took on through the veneer of comedy. For Nazeem Hussain, who is both a cast member of Salam Café and one half of Fear of a Brown Planet: Comedy is a significantly more accessible vehicle [for engagement]. When someone laughs at a joke, a connection has been made. That person laughs because they appreciate the point, whether or not they accept what was said as valid isn’t important. What matters is, they’ve understood. (Hussain, 2011) Comedy, as Andrew Jakubowicz (1994: 99–100) argues, ‘offers an important site for the recomposition of the mythic forms of a society’ because it ‘relies on parody (aesthetics) and satire (social) as responses to conventional values and behaviour’. In highlighting the interlacing of racism with national imaginaries, the two productions leverage off comedy in order to respond to the experience of national mis-interpellation that has seen Muslims constructed as lesser national subjects. ‘Cultural struggle,’ Hall (1998: 450) writes, ‘takes many forms: incorporation, distortion, resistance, negotiation, recuperation’. In the next two sections, I explore how the cast members of Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet ‘talk back’ to the call of mis-interpellation (Chapter 4), and how this ‘talking back’ to the nation is woven into their appeals for

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recognition. While Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet adopt decisively different tactics in this regard, in both claims for recognition are bound to questions of the nation, and that it is through responding to national mis-interpellation that the terms of association become politicised. Salam Café: normalising difference As the first Muslim panel chat show of its kind, Salam Café was a landmark programme not just in Australia but also across the broader Western world. Originally broadcast on Melbourne community television as Ramadan TV between 2005 and 2007, the show won a number of awards before going national on SBS in 2008. Salam Café’s ten-week run was remarkably successful. Not only did the programme win the 2008 ‘Australian Muslim Media of the Year’ award, but in 2009 it was also nominated for an Australian Television Industry award (‘the Logies’) for ‘Most Popular Light Entertainment Programme’. Adopting a format of comedy sketches and vox pops interspersed with discussion of current political and cultural affairs, Salam Café’s panel was made up of young, mostly 20-something Muslim men and women, many of whom have since gone onto significant positions of leadership in fields as diverse as academia, the media, community advocacy and the arts (which includes the two comedians of Fear of a Brown Planet). While very much light entertainment, Salam Café operated with a clear mandate: to humanise the Muslim community at a time when their dehumanisation was almost de rigueur in the Australian mainstream. With images of chanting Islamic mobs, terrorists and suicide bombers dominating the media during this period (arguably the height of the ‘War on Terror’ and its associated rhetoric), Salam Café sought to present a more realistic, and ultimately more human, face of the Muslim community in Australia. The renaming of the show was an important part of this effort (Salam, after all, means peace in Arabic), as was the ethnic and cultural diversity of the cast members, which included individuals from Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Malay, Ethiopian and Anglo-Australian backgrounds, thus standing in sharp contradistinction to monolithic representations of Muslims as Arab as Lebanese (and vice versa). For Susan Carland, one of the panellists and an Anglo convert, Salam Café is ‘just showing that Muslims are normal people … It’s showing the human face of the Muslim community, same as Acropolis Now did [for the Greek community] in the ‘80s. People will see that we won’t eat their babies’ (Molitorisz, 2008). This is done as much for the wider Australian community as it is for Muslims themselves. One of the original co-founders of the show, Ahmad Hassan, frames the show in the following terms: It’s basically to open a window into the Muslim community, to entertain our own community so at least they can have a haven when they watch TV – that there’s some nice, happy, smiling Muslims on and they can have a bit of a laugh – and for the wider Australian community to just

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The dual-facing character of Salam Café’s mandate of humanisation is not unusual in representational politics, wherein the challenge of social misrecognition is frequently part and parcel of group empowerment. Salam Café adopts two key tactics in order to go about its mandate: it takes aim at predominant stereotypes of Muslims and seeks to normalise Muslim difference. Often, these two tactics come together – in a typical vox pop, for example, interviewers ask people ‘what do you know about Islam?’, encountering responses such as ‘not a lot, but I know their beliefs and religion [are] pretty dangerous against the rest of the world’ – with the exposing of misconceptions a platform from which to challenge dehumanisation. Even some of their more straightforward educative sketches are rooted in the stereotypes that make that explanation possible in the first place, providing a useful commentary on the ways in which it is the experience of misrecognition that is the impetus behind struggles for recognition. Their ‘Working with Muslims’ sketch is particularly illustrative here. Offering non-Muslims a guide on Muslims in the workplace, the skit shows practices that may seem alien and strange, such as Ramadan (explaining fasting and that it is okay to eat in front of someone), wudu’ (ritual washing before prayer) and views on alcohol and touching the opposite sex. While seemingly aimed at addressing nonMuslim ignorance, a manoeuvre at the end of the skit points to a deeper dynamic at play. ‘Working with Muslims isn’t that difficult,’ the host concludes, ‘all you need to do is meet our demands … sorry, follow these small tips, and you will have a workplace with greater harmony for everyone – especially Muslims.’ Here, the stereotype of the demanding Muslim who wants to ‘Islamise’ the world reveals itself to be functioning behind the skit, and it is not only Muslim differences that are illuminated but also non-Muslim prejudices and fears. The skit ‘Australian Imam’ is a particularly adept example of the way in which Salam Café plays on stereotypes in order to normalise Muslims. As a take on the singing competition show Australian Idol, in this sketch a panel of judges embark ‘on a search to find Australia’s most controversial Imam’, auditioning three contestants: two are rather harmless and dull, while the third (and judges’ favourite) is the bearded, keffiyeh-wearing Imam Fruitloop. Imam Fruitloop declares himself ‘the only Muslim in Australia … I am the Muslim community. I am the real Islam and they cannot accept it’, receiving an enthusiastic response from the judges. Upon being granted a ‘yes’, Imam Fruitloop removes his beard and keffiyeh, excitedly exclaiming ‘you’re going to be seeing this face on A Current Affair [a popular current affairs program on mainstream television], I’m going to be representing the Muslim community’. ‘Australian Imam’ is clearly a commentary on the Australian media and its fascination with spectacularised representations of Islam. The costume is

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worn at the behest of media interests: ‘I gave the media what they want … I’m going to be this crazy guy that every newspaper and TV station wants to talk about’. The skit, however, has another dimension. As a performative action, Imam Fruitloop’s removal of his stereotypical Islamic characteristics to reveal the person underneath is quite significant. As he sheds the stereotypes that the media desires, the ‘real’ Muslim underneath is revealed – as just an ‘average guy’ also playing with and manipulating stereotypes. This dynamic where stereotypes are consciously and deliberately performed to reveal the human performer underneath is built into Salam Café’s format. Unlike Acropolis Now, for instance, where extreme stereotypes were built into the characters, Salam Café’s panel format where they cut to skits and sketches affords the cast members critical distance. The audience comes to know the cast as themselves when they sit and chat on the panel, and as such comes to the understanding that stereotypes are something they play with rather than what they are. The picture of Muslim difference that Salam Café presents is thus one of predictability and knowability – there is no scary, unknowable Muslim difference here. Even when they perform the terrorist stereotype, as in the ‘Extreme Makeover’ sketch which plays on transforming Hamoudeh the extremist from ‘an embarrassment to militants around the world’ to being confident ‘he can go out in style’, Muslim difference is portrayed as something familiar and unexceptional. The argument that Muslims are just ‘normal’ people is an avowedly liberal task, which seeks equality on the basis of sameness. Certainly, this is turned towards Salam Café’s approach to national identity, wherein the Australian-ness of its cast members is insisted upon and emphasised as equal to, if not more salient than, their Muslimness: this is a ‘I may go to mosque, but I also go to the footy’ approach to claiming recognition. Indeed, even the format of the show, as a panel accompanied by a stand-alone commentator, is a direct mimicry of The Footy Show, a mainstream sports programme especially popular with white audiences. Ahmed Imam, the host of the programme and the son of then Mufti of Australia Fehmi Naji El-Imam, identifies this dynamic clearly: We see … Australian Muslims being the same as Australian non-Muslims. We want to show others so they can see it also, they can turn it on and go, ‘Oh, OK, I can relate to these guys. They’re not what I usually see.’ (Newsome, 2006) For Imam, humour is not just a means to challenge stereotypes but is key to this display of sameness: People are probably not expecting the kinds of stuff that comes out of our mouths. Even [our producer] said, ‘When I saw the show the first time, I was laughing at what you were laughing at. I couldn’t feel any distance’. Humour is a particularly Australian characteristic, and we all originate

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Beyond clashing civilisations from different places, but we’re all Australian. And the humour is probably a reflection of the new kinds of Muslim in Australia, who are comfortable living and practising their faith and joking. (Molitorisz, 2008)

Humour is thus used as a device for cast members to display their adeptness with Australian cultural codes and hence fundamental Australian-ness; it is also a key means through which Muslim difference is normalised. In this regard, Salam Café may be critiqued insofar as it appears to swallow the logic of domestication that says Islam is fine, but only within the boundaries of the nation-state. It could likewise be argued that its emphasis on explaining Muslim difference risks positioning Salam Café as the ‘good’ and ‘helpful’ migrants who are happy to poke fun at themselves and explain their difference in ways that non-Muslim Australia can understand.11 Not only does this perhaps compromise the efficacy of some skits to promote group empowerment (the ‘Working with Muslims’ sketch, for instance, comes close to according an ‘identity script’ for Muslims and non-Muslims alike (Appiah, 1994: 163)), but it also constrains the show’s ability to ‘talk back’ to the dominant script. Certainly, in some regards, Salam Café seems to uncritically adopt Australian hegemonic logics. Consider Imam’s explanation for the prejudice faced by the Muslim community, which resonates with the popular ‘waves of immigration’ thesis I referred to earlier: Everybody has their time. The Italians, the Greeks, the Asians, they all had their time. Now it’s the Muslims and probably even more so at the moment it’s the African community. It could be someone else next. The Italians, Greeks and Asians have all come through that and it’s going to happen with Muslims, too, and hopefully this show will assist with that process. Not that we’re sponsored by the Department of Immigration. (Molitorisz, 2008) While this approach is perhaps to be expected given both the show’s mandate and the political economy of television production, wherein ‘the aim to be broadly appealing … works against any possible “edginess”, if by “edginesss” we mean critical cultural difference and disruption’ (Nicholls, 2011: 580), it is through reiterating hegemonic logics that Salam Café threatens to be (re)inserted back into the structures of misrecognition. Nevertheless, I want to challenge this reading and argue that there is a deeper dynamic of disruption in Salam Café, which emerges most powerfully when it engages directly with Muslim mis-interpellation and performs Australian-ness in light of this experience. Uncle Sam(eer) is arguably the most hard-hitting of all Salam Café’s characters in this regard, despite being painted as a bumbling and ultimately harmless radical Muslim cleric. Throughout the period of the programme, Uncle Sam embarks on a mission to become the mayor of Camden – the infamous town some 60 kilometres northwest of

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Sydney which disallowed the building of an Islamic school in 2008–9 following fervid protests from townspeople. Uncle Sam’s campaign platform rests in the renaming of the town to ‘Islamden’ and establishing it as the first Islamic state in Australia.12 In contrast to the claims of protestors that Muslims threatened the ‘Australian-ness’ of Camden, Uncle Sam performs his Muslimness simultaneously with his Australian-ness, provoking bemused responses from locals. Indeed, Uncle Sam takes his Australian-ness so for granted that he seems befuddled by the negative responses of some to his platform, and seems not to comprehend why people may not want to vote for him. The fact that he may not be seen as Australian escapes him; and while this is a deliberate performance, what it suggests is that the joke is in fact on ‘them’. This dynamic is even more stridently asserted when Uncle Sam is interviewed on a popular Australian chat show hosted by Andrew Denton. Uncle Sam emerges from backstage wrapped in an Australian flag, immediately clarifying ‘I am also an Australian citizen, even though you may not think that’. His stereotypically Muslim characteristics are juxtaposed with an overplayed Australian-ness, including wearing the flag and using terms like ‘fair dinkum’, demonstrating a seeming incongruence between the two. Uncle Sam feels the need to remind the host and the audience of his Australian identity and the burden of proof placed upon him: ‘Sometimes people just don’t think that you are Australian … people think you are just from, you know, different country, you don’t belong in the country, that you are not Australian citizen so you need to prove it by wearing Australian flag and carrying passport’. When asked ‘do you find this attitude a lot?’, Uncle Sam decisively responds ‘I don’t find it, I get it thrown in my face’. Uncle Sam is not assimilated into the Australian identity nor does he seek to ‘integrate’ in the way it is popularly imagined. In some ways, his quest to become Australian is a tragic one, doomed to failure. But in other ways, he unsettles the category of Australian altogether as he speaks as both Australian and Muslim. Uncle Sam touts his idea of making not just Camden, but the whole world an Islamic state, again indicating that he ‘doesn’t get’ why some Australians may have a problem with this. In this sense, Uncle Sam’s sense of entitlement to get what he wants as an Australian citizen can be read as an attempt to deeply unsettle conceptions of national identity that rest on the idea that some nationals are more ‘national’ than others; he presents an alternative economy of Australian-ness in which the national ‘we’ is not what we thought it was. Imam’s brand of ‘we’re all Australian’ may very well be read in a similar way. Fear of a Brown Planet: combative difference Stand-up comedy show Fear of a Brown Planet – comprising comedians Nazeem Hussain and Aamer Rahman – debuted at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2008, winning the ‘Best Newcomer’ award. The show has since regularly toured Australia, Asia and the United Kingdom, enjoying a great deal of media attention in the past few years, not least because of its

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astringent humour and focus on the issues of race and racism. In addition to receiving wide critical acclaim, in 2011 Fear of a Brown Planet was the focus of the programme ‘Australian Story’, which aired on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) television network to some million viewers nationally. More recently, the two comedians have started to emerge as individual performers in their own right. Hussain hosted his own television comedy series Legally Brown, which screened for two seasons in 2013 and 2014 on SBS; Rahman made his solo stand-up comedy debut at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2013. If Salam Café is the seemingly comfortable, overtly liberal response to Muslim misrecognition in Australia, Fear of a Brown Planet positions itself as the far more interrogative and ultimately radical intervention. This is perhaps not surprising considering that the duo take their title from the album ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ by the African American hip hop group Public Enemy, who are well known for their militant stance and lyrics addressing white racism and black disadvantage in the United States. The differences between the two productions are most striking with regard to how they utilise humour. Whereas Salam Café employs humour as a means to reduce the distance between Muslim and non-Muslim Australians and thus to illustrate their fundamental sameness, Fear of a Brown Planet uses humour as a platform from which to criticise Australian society for its treatment of Muslims; to ‘say things [they] think without going to Guantanamo Bay’, as Rahman puts it. This oppositional stance is to a large extent empowered by its format. As Hussain (2011) explains, ‘stand-up comedy is one medium which is, fundamentally, an art of protest. Historically, it has been used as a tool by communities and people with ideas that challenge and provoke the status quo with a spirit of counterculture.’ While Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet are far more sophisticated productions, some parallels can be made to Acropolis Now and Wogs Out of Work. As Tony Mitchell (1992: 9) argues, while Wogs out of Work utilised far more explicit themes and language than Acropolis Now, its humour was nevertheless more sophisticated in that it was able to portray the complexities of social inclusion for ‘young second generation Mediterranean migrants, migrant women workers and social outcasts’, as well as satire the ‘AngloAustralian yuppies who affect a token concern about “new Australians”’. Acropolis Now, in contrast, had to play the lowest common denominator, and in doing so lost much of its subtlety and, most worryingly, reoriented ‘wog’ back from a positive expression of origin to a term of derision. Like Salam Café, Fear of a Brown Planet leverages off common stereotypes of Muslims, although it does this in a far more subversive manner. Refusing the compulsion to humanise Muslims and normalise Muslim difference, the two comedians wear the ‘bad subject’ label proudly: rather than playing with stereotypes to reveal the human underneath, Fear of a Brown Planet instead builds stereotypes on stereotypes, turning the burden of misrecognition back onto the (non-Muslim) audience. The overplaying of stereotypes is an

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important means through which to challenge their normality. As Fiske (1990: 328) says: excessiveness, sensationalism, and exaggeration are stylistic devices of contradiction … each of these devices takes ideological norms and then exceeds them, magnifies them so that their normality is brought to our attention and is not allowed to continue its ideological work unseen: its powerful positional of the ‘taken-for-granted’ is thus disturbed. They promote a norm and then exceed it, spilling over beyond its ideological containment. This excess meaning then becomes a resource that people can use to interrogate or contradict the normal, the excessive is meaning that has escaped the control of the norm. Telling a story about his sister, for instance, Hussain explains how she was verbally assaulted on her way home from university, with a man shouting at her ‘get out of my country you towel head’ in response to her hijab. Hussain pre-empts the typical liberal response to the hijab issue, reminding the audience that it is both a matter of personal choice and an item of clothing not dissimilar to others. However, he turns liberal expectations on their head when he clarifies that ‘I would have gotten her here to speak to you guys about her experiences … but it’s after four o’clock and she’s not allowed out’. The point he appears to be making is less one about sexism, and more about the nature of difference which can be as discomforting as it can be pleasurable. Equally, in refusing to stake claim on the ‘real’ person under the stereotypes, Hussain makes important commentary on the non-Muslim fascination with knowing and defining Muslim difference. Fear of a Brown Planet, however, reserves their most radical interjections for stereotypes of a different kind: those of Anglo Australia. Like Public Enemy, Hussain and Rahman engage with white racism at length, employing tongue-in-cheek observations of white culture and Anglo stereotypes in order to reverse the discomforting gaze of misrecognition – revealing just how discomforting it is. Their ‘Workshops for Whitey’ skit, for instance, contains a number of lessons for their white audience members, including ‘don’t compliment me on my English’, ‘just because I’m at the petrol station, doesn’t mean that I work here’ and, for white women, ‘why do you clutch your handbag when you see me’. Fear of a Brown Planet thus turns the issue of post-9/11 into a problem not of Islam or Muslim terrorists, but rather of white racism towards minorities, particularly ‘brown’ ones. Rahman confronts white Australians with a literal ‘what the hell is your problem?’, continuing that ‘the whole time I’ve grown up in Australia, I’ve only heard white people complain about other people’s cultures’. The logic they adopt is hence deeply counter-hegemonic to that of mainstream Australia. Indeed, compared to Imam of Salam Café’s uncritical acceptance of the ‘waves of immigration’ thesis, Hussain plays on the discomfort he and Rahman often cause their white audience members. ‘I will say this to white people … You don’t

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understand, the Greeks had it tough, the Asians had it tough, don’t worry, it’s just your turn’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fear of a Brown Planet’s unforgiving stance on white Australia has seen them encounter a degree of ire from conservative quarters in particular, ranging from claims of anti-white racism to death threats (Australian Story, 2011). In this sense, Fear of a Brown Planet is the deeply angry second generation of which Hage speaks (see Chapter 4), and a great deal of this anger is connected to the experience of mis-interpellation. As much as stereotypes are the stuff of their sketches, it is how these intersect with the construction of Muslims as ‘lesser nationals’ that characterises their approach to misrecognition. For Hussain and Rahman, stereotypes are pertinent insofar as they are used to enact exclusion (both discuss the frustration of being asked that perennial question, ‘where are you from?’), but they are also aware of the ways in which they limit expressions of difference. Hussain, for instance, speaks of his frustration with the ways in which ‘ethnic’ performers continue to be positioned in Australian popular culture: Every time I do a stand-up joke about a white person or white people, people always follow me up after the show to say, ‘Dude, you seriously can’t make those type of jokes in Australia. You’re talking about racism but making jokes about white people – that’s racist’. When you’re making jokes about your own community those same people will laugh hysterically, but as soon as you point the finger the other way you get, ‘Come on, take it easy mate’. As an ethnic comedian there’s an outside expectation that you’ll only make jokes about your parents and their friends. That’s tiring. (Mathieson, 2013) As an intervention, Fear of a Brown Planet rallies against the constraints created by misrecognition – whether in broader Australian society or comedy as an art form – and is deeply critical of the power inequalities that make misrecognition a seeming default for Muslim communities. Significantly, these power inequalities lay in the structural centrality of the white Anglo in Australian national imaginations; an observation at which Salam Café only tacitly hints. With numerous skits targeting the intertwinings of Australian national identity with white racism and prejudice, it would seem that Fear of a Brown Planet has rejected the nation altogether, even in its multicultural variants: ‘There’s a really banal, unassuming racism in Australia,’ says Rahman. ‘The most basic question you get asked all the time is “Where are you from?” Or people say “Welcome to Australia”. It’s still overwhelmingly an idea of white ownership of this country.’ A lot of this stuff, adds Hussain, is patronising and possibly unintentional. But even multiculturalism is seen as ‘a kind of favour from white people.’ (Freeman-Greene, 2010)

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However, the two comedians betray a more ambivalent relationship to nation than one of simple rejection. Like all minorities, Fear of a Brown Planet has a deep understanding of majority cultural formations, and the two comedians rely on this intensively in order to make incisive observations of white Anglo culture. Their skits are empowered by a simultaneous insider/ outsider status: ‘Australia is so racist,’ Rahman declares, ‘other countries are embarrassed by us’, simultaneously asserting himself as a target of that racism and part of the national ‘us’. Yet, Fear of a Brown Planet does something more than simply point to the ambivalent positioning of Muslims in the nation, where they are part of it and yet not part of it. Importantly, it mounts their criticisms of mainstream Australia in order to assert themselves as equal partners in the national project. Hussain’s critique of the expectations placed on ethnic comedians is not simply for the sake of critique: rather, he positions his intervention as a means to ‘democratise’ ethnic-based comedy, wherein whiteness is exposed as a particular ethnicity rather than just the norm. Likewise, it is a means for him to stake a claim on Australian-ness: ‘if you can’t make jokes about Australia, what is the point of being an Australian comic?’ (Mathieson, 2013). Thought this way, it is understandable how Fear of a Brown Planet has compelled such antagonism from conservatives because they take for granted their Australian-ness rather than seeking to be recognised as Australian; they thus present an alternate, directly competing vision of nation-ness that runs up against and exposes the limits of the hegemonic version. What is most subversive here is that the national ‘we’ is not something into which difference can integrate or even assimilate, but is instead messy and characterised by varying dimensions of identification and affiliation. The national ‘we’ becomes a means through which the writers of Fear of a Brown Planet assert themselves as citizens capable of speaking up and back with an equally legitimate political vision of community. This is similar to Uncle Sam, although, conversely, Fear of a Brown Planet’s competing vision of community is more palatable to liberal sensibilities than is Uncle Sam’s tongue-in-cheek vision of establishing Australia as part of the Islamic caliphate. Asserts Rahman: ‘we have an idea of what the world should be like or what society should be like. You know like racism shouldn’t exist, or racist violence shouldn’t exist’ (Low, 2011).

Beyond clashing civilisations The media, cultural and political landscapes in Australia have changed quite significantly in the years since Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet first appeared. In many ways, the two productions – but especially Salam Café – were trailblazers, paving the way for a greater diversity of Muslim voices in the media, arts and culture, as well as an expanded sphere of intervention where Muslims are able to speak to a variety of issues, not just ‘ethnic’ or ‘minority’ ones. Hussain’s Legally Brown, for instance, quite consciously

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lampoons everything from political correctness to stereotypes about Muslims and bogans (traditionally associated with working- and lower middle-class culture in Australia). The debut episode began with the qualifier that white viewers would be ‘expecting funny accents, jokes about the weird food we eat and stories about my wacky ethnic parents. Sorry to disappoint.’ In an opinion piece about the show, Waleed Aly (2013) writes that Hussain is ‘speaking with a voice we rarely hear from a minority: one that simply assumes its place as an insider. His is a political voice, sure. But it’s also an Australian voice. And that, I suspect, is what’s most likely to offend.’ It is regular panel member and producer of Salam Café Aly, however, who has come to occupy a position of unprecedented influence in mainstream media, affording him the status of ‘public face of Islam in Australia’ – something he has publicly both disavowed and expressed his discomfort with (Lyons, 2016). A regular commentator, radio host and media presenter, in 2015 Aly became a permanent co-host of Channel Ten’s (a commercial television station) The Project which airs on weeknights. A number of Aly’s segments, in particular his piece on the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris (with 30 million views online), have reached the international arena, and in May 2016 he won the Gold Logie award for ‘Best Personality on Australian Television’. While Aly is a controversial, if not somewhat polarising, figure – he has been the focus of a significant amount of racist attention on the Right and also has a number of detractors within the Muslim community – his current influence in Australian media and cultural circuits has been critical for the development of a more nuanced public representation of Muslims and non-white minorities more broadly. At the same time, the specific geopolitical configurations of the War on Terror that were so important in shaping the interventions of both Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet have significantly changed, especially since the Arab Spring of 2011. The emergence of Islamic State in the vacuum of power produced by the Syrian civil war and state dysfunctionality in Iraq, in particular, has shifted the play of power in the Middle East, with a number of authoritarian governments wielding the language of ‘the war against terrorism’ to legitimise increasing social and political repression (such as the 2013 coup against the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt by General el-Sisi), accompanied by mounting sectarianism. In the West, the growing frequency of terrorist attacks carried out by nationals pledging affiliation to Islamic State has seen anti-Islam and anti-Muslim rhetoric become all the more inflammatory, with a number of governments introducing ever more restrictive legal and political measures related to matters of state security. Australian newspapers have resorted to increasingly incendiary headlines (‘MOTHER OF ALL MONSTERS: ISIS teen warns mum of plot. She does NOTHING,’ reads the 24 October 2016 edition of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph). Most recently at the time of writing, the federal immigration minister Peter Dutton declared that it was a mistake to have resettled Lebanese Muslims in Australia, claiming that many people charged with

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terrorism-related offences came from this background – despite widespread public outcry, he refused to renege on his statement, asserting that his intention was merely to initiate an ‘honest discussion’ (Belot, 2016). Perhaps most worryingly, the 2015 Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill laid out a number of ways in which dual citizens suspected of criminal activity may lose their citizenship. The most controversial of these is acting inconsistently with allegiance to Australia, whether through perusing banned material or financing terrorism (even if unknown through a foreign charity, for instance), which is considered to constitute an immediate renunciation of citizenship that can then be put into effect by the Immigration Department (Bradley, 2015). If Samuel Huntington’s (1996) prophesised ‘clash of civilisations’ has come to pass, it has perhaps not done so in the way he and his adherents might have expected. Instead of falling on ‘civilisational’ lines (whatever these may be) in a conflict between West and Rest, increasing ideological polarisation across the globe has seen a proliferation of local fractures and fissures. For every Aly or Hussain speaking on behalf of ‘the nation’, there is a Hanson or Dutton proclaiming to speak on behalf of the same thing. One of the most attention-grabbing incidents in Australia in 2015 was a teenager who had planned to carry out a terror attack on ANZAC day, a popularly sacralised national holiday, by stuffing a kangaroo’s pouch full of explosives and directing it towards police – he received a ten-year sentence the following year (Siegel, 2016). We are yet to develop an analytical language through which to make sense of such events without further fostering the polarisation of discourse. Likewise, we are yet to fully reckon with the implications of such polarisation for recognition struggles. If the claim for recognition derives from and expands our moral horizons, it begs the question: in a fractured society, where do ‘our’ horizons lie? Nonetheless, in affording us a more complex picture of the dynamics of misrecognition in a multicultural context, Salam Café and Fear of a Brown Planet would seem to point us in a productive direction. In performing and deconstructing Australian-ness, they emphasise the right of Muslims as a political and cultural constituency to shape multicultural politics in Australia. And perhaps most significantly, the two productions avow that, when it comes to shaping understandings of what it means to be Australian, it may just be their turn.

Notes 1 In the Australian vernacular, ‘Leb’ is a derogatory term for Lebanese and ‘wog’ a term that originally referred to people of Italian and Greek background, but is now used more broadly to designate ethnic communities in general. 2 From one of the text messages that circulated the week prior, sent out to some 270,000 people. These messages were also broadcast on Sydney’s 2GB talkback radio station. 3 A review of the test was undertaken in 2008 and a number of changes were implemented in 2009.

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4 Roughly 480,000 people. 5 Although I am aware of the imbrications of Western secularism and Christianity, secular here is used to designate a nominal division between church and state. While Australia’s public sphere and political culture are widely deemed to be secular, they are nevertheless structured by an implicit Christian ethic. 6 It is pertinent to note the gendered dimension of these stereotypes. This was particularly evident in the discourses surrounding the Cronulla riots, where protestors saw themselves as defending ‘Anglo girls’ from harassment by Lebanese men. Considering that the purported clash of cultures on Cronulla’s beaches was imagined through the crude sartorial formula ‘our women wear bikinis, your women wear burqas’, it is perhaps not surprising that the ‘burqini’ (a garment that covers head to toe enabling observant Muslim women to partake in water sports including surf lifesaving) came to be symbolic of post-Cronulla reconciliation. 7 In 2006, 13.4 per cent of Muslims were unemployed compared to 5.2 per cent of the general population, indicating significant disadvantage in the labour market (Lovat et al., 2011). 8 This rhetoric escalated in 2001 and 2002 in response to the ‘gang rapes crisis’ where eight serious sexual assaults were committed by Middle Eastern Muslims in Bankstown, an area with one of the highest concentrations of Arabic speakers in Australia (Poynting et al., 2004: 17–18). These horrific rapes were popularly inscribed with a race dimension, with the attackers apparently asking if the victims had any ‘Arabic blood’. 9 In the years since, Australia has instituted one of the most punitive border security policies in the world, where irregular maritime arrivals are placed in offshore processing, in many cases indefinitely (see Chambers, forthcoming). 10 ‘What’s that other thing I say? You can take the boy out of Brunswick, but you can’t take Brunswick out of the boy.’ 11 It is important to note that Salam Café encountered ire from some members of the Muslim community who felt that they should have invested more effort in explaining the tenets of Islam. Susan Carland explains that this was a theological decision, likening, as Peta Stephenson (2010: 12) paraphrases, ‘the current state of affairs to the period in Muhammad’s life prior to his reception of revelations from God. Long before he became a Prophet his good deeds helped him to gain the trust and confidence of the locals. Consequently, when the Prophet Muhammad starting preaching to them about Allah, they were much more receptive to his message.’ 12 Given the actual creation of Islamic State in the Middle East in recent years, there is no doubt that such a skit would have significantly different meanings should it be performed now.

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Low, L. (2011) ‘Fear of a brown planet: Fight the power with laughter’. Peril: AsianAustralian Arts and Culture, 5 January. www.peril.com.au/2010-2011/edition10/fea r-of-a-brown-planet-fight-the-power-with-laughter/ (accessed 16 November 2016). Lyons, J. (2016) ‘Waleed Aly: Why all the haters?’ Australian, 23 April. www.theaustra lian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/waleed-aly-why-all-the-haters/news-s tory/231adcd9faf13e305af52c03a5d5e0d5 (accessed 16 November 2016). Mamdani, M. (2004) Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the roots of terror. New York: Three Leaves Press. Marr, D. and Wilkinson, M. (2003) Dark victory. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Mathieson, C. (2013) ‘The balls to make the bogans laugh’. Age, 14 March. www.thea ge.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/the-balls-to-make-the-bogans-laugh-20130312-2 fyci.html (accessed 15 November 2016). Mitchell, T. (1992) ‘Wogs still out of work: Australian television comedy as colonial discourse’. Australasian Drama Studies 20: 119–133. Molitorisz, S. (2008) ‘Waleed’s world, party time’. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 May. www.smh.com.au/news/tv–radio/waleeds-world-party-time-/2008/05/03/1209235229691. html?page=3 (accessed 15 November 2016). Newsome, B. (2006) ‘Melbourne Muslims on air’. Age, 26 October. www.theage.com. au/articles/2006/10/25/1161699354391.html?page=fullpage (accessed 17 November 2016). Nicholls, B. (2011) ‘East West 101 as edgy text: Television police drama and Australian multiculturalism’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 25(4): 573–582. Perera, S. (2002) ‘A line in the sea: The Tampa, boat stories and the border’. Cultural Studies Review 8(1): 11–27. Phillips, M. (2012) ‘All-white Australian television fails the reality test’. Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February. www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a llwhite-australian-television-fails-the-reality-test-20120217-1tdbo.html (accessed 14 November 2016). Poynting, S., Tabar, P., Noble, G. and Collins, J. (2004) Bin Laden in the suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other. Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology Series. Pratt, D. (2011) ‘Islamophobia, ignorance, imagination and interaction’. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 22(4): 379–389. Reynolds, H. (2007) ‘Part of a continent for something less than a nation? The limits of Australian sovereignty’. In S. Perera (ed.), Our patch: Enacting Australian sovereignty post 2001 (pp. 61–70). Perth: Network Books. Said, E.W. (1981) Covering Islam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Said, E.W. (2003) Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient, 2nd ed. London: Penguin. Siegel, M. (2016) ‘Australian teen jailed over ANZAC day kangaroo bomb terror plot’. Huffington Post, 5 September. www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/09/05/teen-get s-10-years-jail-over-anzac-day-kangaroo-bomb-terror-plot/ (accessed 10 December 2016). Stephenson, P. (2010) ‘Home-growing Islam: The role of Australian Muslim youth in intra- and inter-cultural exchange’. NCEIS Research Papers 3(6): 1–21. Street, J. (1997) Politics and popular culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Street, J., Inthorn, S. and Scott, M. (2011) ‘Playing at politics? Popular culture as political engagement’. Parliamentary Affairs 65: 338–358.

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Sydow, C. (2015) ‘Pegida in Australien: Der Hass ist der gleiche’. Spiegel Online, 13 April. www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/pegida-in-australien-reclaim-australia-a-1028225.html (accessed 11 October 2016). Thomassen, L. (2011) ‘(Not) just a piece of cloth: Begum, recognition, and the politics of representation’. Political Theory 39(3): 325–351. van Zoonen, L. (2005) Entertaining the citizen: When politics and popular culture converge. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Walker, D.R. (1999) Anxious nation: Australia and the rise of Asia, 1850–1939. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Woodlock, R. (2011) ‘Being an Aussie Mossie: Muslim and Australian identity among Australian-born Muslims’. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 22(4): 391–407.

6

Aboriginal Australians and recognition politics Reconciliation, apology, sovereignty

At the moment, we are part of the community but we sit outside it. (Clark, 2000: 231) The river is the river and the sea is the sea. Salt water and fresh, two separate domains. Each has its own complex patterns, origins, stories. Even though they come together they will always exist in their own right. Our hope for Reconciliation is like that. (Dodson, 1996)

Recognition is undoubtedly a matter of critical importance for Indigenous peoples. As groups who have historically been denied humanity by their settler colonisers and subjected to a barrage of racist tropes concerning their supposed cultural and social inferiority, the language of recognition not only pinpoints many dimensions of Indigenous experiences of injustice, but would also seem to complement struggles for rights, cultural survival and selfdetermination. Demanding affirmation of cultural distinctiveness is a powerful and positive revaluation of Indigenous identities and ways of life, which are all too often disparaged and belittled in wider society. It likewise buttresses claims to special status as original inhabitants, with political implications ranging from fishing and hunting rights, the restitution of land, to measures that enhance Indigenous control over their own affairs. The demand for Indigenous recognition furthermore poses powerful challenges to settler societies to admit the historical injustice of dispossession and how it continues to shape contemporary inequalities. If struggles for recognition expand social horizons of justice and morality as Honneth (1995) suggests, Indigenous claims for recognition demand their radical reconfiguration. In demonstrating how settler visions of the good life are systematically embroiled in the continued domination and exclusion of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous struggles for recognition require settler societies to face up to uncomfortable and often repressed pasts and truths and acknowledge the deep asymmetries of power that characterise settler–Indigenous relationships. Nevertheless, it is the case that increasing numbers of scholars have begun to challenge this enshrining of Indigenous claims to social justice within the

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discourse of recognition, not least because it would seem to sublimate Indigenous politics to settler issues and concerns. The Dené political theorist Glen Coulthard (2007), who we considered in Chapter 3, is amongst the most influential of these voices. Focusing on Canada’s First Nations, Coulthard maintains that the liberal politics of recognition entices Indigenous peoples to identify with the settler state and society, rather than affording them the genuine freedom, equality and self-determination that decolonisation demands. I argued in Chapter 3 that the politics of recognition should not be seen as necessarily enfolding Indigenous peoples and other minorities within the orbit of colonial power. However, Coulthard’s point regarding the limitations and potential pitfalls of recognition politics for Indigenous peoples is well taken. In large-scale exchanges of recognition mediated by the state, Indigenous peoples, who are usually small minorities with only limited political power, are at a decisive disadvantage. Not only do they have to appeal to be recognised by the state and settler society directly complicit in their collective dispossession, thus potentially undermining their claims to competing sovereignty, but Indigenous peoples are rarely in the position of setting the terms of recognition exchanges. Indigenous cultural distinctiveness is characterised by particular ontologies, laws, traditions and relationships to land generally incompatible with, and often antagonistic to, those of Western liberal modernity. The struggle for recognition may thus see Indigenous peoples placed in positions where they have to conform to the expectations of dominant society in order to be worthy of recognition. Similarly, such enormous power discrepancies between ‘recogniser’ and ‘recognisee’ means that the promise of a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Taylor, 1994) through the struggle for recognition risks the assimilation of Indigenous difference into the settler fold. Such concerns are only amplified in contexts where Indigenous recognition is attached to projects of reconciliation concerned with post-colonial nation building, as has been the case in Australia since the early 1990s. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples1 has come to be articulated in terms of the reconciliation of the Australian nation. The heralding of the trope of nation building in the Australian reconciliation process has in many ways proven critical in advancing the cause of Aboriginal recognition, compelling settler Australians to examine their historical complicity in Indigenous dispossession and reorient their perceptions of Aboriginal communities. Yet, it is apparent that the idea of a united nation on which reconciliation rests is particularly problematic for Aboriginal peoples. It would be remiss not to recognise that the very possibility of an ‘Australian nation’ was only made possible by invasion and conquest, with the elimination of Indigenous peoples from the national landscape the primary historical condition of its development (Wolfe, 1994). Moreover, efforts to turn Aboriginal peoples into ‘fellow Australians’ have been responsible for many of the injustices they have experienced (Muldoon and Schaap, 2011: 184), guiding policies of assimilation as well as a range of other coercive measures.

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Tying Indigenous recognition to the national imaginary most certainly compels an identification objectionable to many Aboriginal people and is all too often used to quash Aboriginal claims to cultural distinctiveness: if we are all Australians, the counter-charge typically goes, why are Aboriginal people deserving of special treatment? It is thus not surprising that the nation-building emphasis of reconciliation in Australia has been variously charged as reductive of Indigenous alterities (Povinelli, 1998) and putting a ceiling on Aboriginal political aspirations (Short, 2005). It is equally not surprising that critical scholars and activists have increasingly turned away from reconciliation in favour of Aboriginal sovereignty and the struggle for a treaty between Aboriginal peoples and the Australian state, which is regarded as better equipped to afford Indigenous Australians recognition and self-determination (e.g. Altman and Hinkson, 2007; Muldoon and Schaap, 2011; Behrendt, 2012). This chapter argues that appeals to nation should not be seen as innately incompatible with or assimilative of Indigenous cultural difference. Instead, I argue that as much as the discourse of nation can be put to purposes decisively at odds with the pursuit of Aboriginal recognition, it remains an indispensable and politically productive vocabulary for Indigenous claims. On the one hand, ideas of national identity and culture forge specific structures of exclusion and discrimination for Indigenous peoples. Like the case of Muslim Australians explored in Chapter 5, there are important transnational dimensions to Aboriginal (mis)recognition. Not only is there a striking regularity to stereotypes of Indigenous peoples in Western settler colonialisms (Veracini, 2010), but the development of Indigenous peoples as a political constituency is also very much tied to global developments and transnational mobilisations (Merlan, 2009).2 Neglecting the significance of the national imaginary in Aboriginal experiences of misrecognition, however, robs those experiences of their specific social meanings. This is something which the Australian reconciliation process, as fragile and incomplete as it has been, makes explicit, insofar as it points towards the ways in which the recognition of Indigenous peoples is impossible without interrogation of the ‘political culture’ (Celermajer, 2006) productive of their misrecognition. On the other hand, appealing to the nation is an important means through which Aboriginal people are able to situate their demands for recognition of cultural distinctiveness within a wider moral and political grammar. For critics of reconciliation, the project of constructing national community is an unavoidably ideological enterprise, because it is enforcing of unity. This chapter borrows Andrew Schaap’s (2008) distinction between ‘reconciliation as ideology’ and ‘reconciliation as politics’ in order to argue that the national ‘we’ must be understood as both ideological and political. Invocations of nation can be understood as political when they allow for the contestation of the terms of association. I illustrate this by engaging what is widely regarded to be the foremost achievement of the reconciliation process: the 2008 apology delivered by former prime minister Kevin Rudd to the ‘Stolen

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Generations’ – Aboriginal people affected by the policy of forced child removal that took place over much of the twentieth century. If Rudd’s speech was at its most political precisely at the moment that the bounds of the national community were blurred by multiple ‘wes’ (national, Indigenous, non-Indigenous) running up against each other, this politicisation of nation is clearly evident in Aboriginal public reactions to the apology where difference is asserted through speaking to a national ‘we’. Recognising the productive ways in which the nation affords a moral and political grammar for Indigenous claims is important because it affords a conceptual route out of what Dirk Moses (2011) calls the ‘resistance/co-option dichotomy’ of much critical scholarship, which is severely constraining of Indigenous political agency. Furthermore, it is important because seeing how Aboriginal claims are as much appeals to difference as they are to participation in civic life may allow for richer engagement with Indigenous distinctiveness, particularly when it comes to modalities of imagining community and difference. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on the turn to sovereignty in Indigenous politics and scholarship. A number of scholars have quite rightfully emphasised how the moral and ethical focus of the Australian reconciliation process has sidelined more substantive questions regarding the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Australian state. Rather than seeing the nation as purely a trope used to shore up state sovereignty, I suggest that such work would be well served to consider how the nation functions as a motif through which demands may be made on the state in the name of a moral community. For now, however, let us begin by exploring the multidimensions of Aboriginal recognition in Australia in more detail.

Aboriginal recognition in the settler nation The vast majority of Australia’s history has been characterised by what anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner (1969) famously called the ‘Great Australian Silence’: a ‘cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale’ (p. 25) where Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations are concerned, characterised by an unwillingness to recognise settlement as directly complicit in invasion, theft of land and massacres. Since the arrival of Captain James Cook at Botany Bay in 1788, the British settler colonisation of Australia has had disastrous consequences for Aboriginal peoples and ways of life. Massive violence at the colonial frontier, combined with the introduction of infectious diseases like measles, chicken pox and tuberculosis, forced displacement into reservations, stations and missions and sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men (Wolfe, 1994), resulted in the decimation of the Indigenous population over the nineteenth century. By Federation in 1901, it is estimated that around 75 per cent of the pre-invasion population (approximately 300,000) had either succumbed to disease or were killed at the frontier (McIntosh, 2003: 293), making for a tiny minority in a nation that conceived of itself as racially white. Aboriginal peoples were afforded no acknowledgement as part of the

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newly founded nation. Indeed, they were actively discriminated against in the constitution, excluded from being counted as part of the Australian population in the census as well as from the legislative scope of power, which enabled the Australian Commonwealth to make ‘laws for people of any race, other than the aboriginal race’ (Pritchard, 2011: 45). The predominant ideological presumption at the turn of the twentieth century – informed by evolutionist doctrine and biological racism – was that the Aborigines of Australia were a ‘dying race’ and soon to be assimilated or absorbed into the white national fold. For much of the twentieth century, if there was ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal peoples it was only as a ‘fading demographic and cultural presence’ in the Australian nation (Rowse, 2012: 3–4). This idea did not lose credibility until the 1960s, when it became apparent that not only were Aborigines not dying out as widely presumed, but were in fact increasingly identifying with their Indigenous heritage and aggrieved by their treatment in settler society. Tim Rowse (2012) identifies the 1960s as marking a critical shift in the configurations of Aboriginal recognition in Australia where, instead of being regarded as mere ‘populations’ to be absorbed into the wider one, a discourse of Indigenous ‘peoplehood’ came to take political and policy precedence. Buoyed by the development of a global Indigenous political presence and a variety of struggles for social justice, Aboriginal peoples began to agitate and mobilise as a distinct people with its own legal and governmental heritage rooted in customary law (p. 4). This shift in the terms of recognition was reflected in reforms to Indigenous affairs policy. The late 1960s, for instance, saw allowances for Aboriginal peoples to maintain a separate identity and establish or maintain certain institutions. In the 1970s the government began to admit (albeit partially) Aboriginal rights to land, allowing Indigenous groups to own (according to Australian law) ‘some of the land they saw as belonging to them by custom and tradition’. It is important, not to see the shift to Indigenous recognition as ‘peoples’ as entirely supplanting that of ‘populations’. Rather, as Rowse emphasises, both ‘recognitions’ continue to animate the landscape of Indigenous affairs in contemporary Australia and each leverages off a certain vision of social justice (2012, xv). The recognition of Aboriginals as ‘defined subsets of the Australian population quantified in terms of socio-economic characteristics and comparable to the Australian population’ envisions social justice in terms of equality and citizenship grounded in statistical parity. Recognition of Aboriginals as peoples with ‘rights to land and self-government attributes them with self-governing capacities whether recently acquired or arising from their heritage’ and thus heralds social justice in terms of ‘negotiated political relationships’. Whereas the particular presumptions that inform these two recognitions are not always compatible with each other – and, indeed, may at times come into direct conflict – the representation of Aboriginals as ‘populations’ and ‘peoples’ are both indispensable for Aboriginal claims. ‘The Indigenous Australian struggle,’ prominent Aboriginal figure Noel Pearson

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(2007) writes, ‘is for socio-economic advancement and equality, but it is also about the recognition of status and rights as a people’. The peoples/populations distinction points to the complex ways in which visions of social justice as parity and social justice as difference inform Aboriginal struggles for recognition as well as contemporary Australian Indigenous affairs policy. What is particularly fruitful for our purposes is how it affords a sense of the complexities and difficulties of Aboriginal recognition in Australia. While both lay out vital social justice claims and political agendas, they each set certain discursive and rhetorical limits. As much as ‘the “recognition” of Indigenous Australians as a “population” could easily be taken for granted as a technical achievement’, it is important to ‘concede that the Indigenous population is not a natural fact that the colonists must recognise’ (Rowse, 2012: 8). Colonial authorities made decisions regarding the counting and classification of colonised populations in order to administer and control them. Such techniques and practices of population management, which very often rested on notions of race and blood quotient, were critical to enforcing colonial rule. Prior to Federation, the Australian colonies (now states and territories) each passed laws to govern Aboriginal populations in their jurisdictions, thus making it necessary to legally define ‘Aborigine’ and count them accordingly. The development of specialised administrations at the end of the nineteenth century saw Aboriginals classified according to their racial character (‘half-bloods’ versus ‘full-bloods’) and relationship to administrative control. In particular, whether they lived within ‘settled districts’, were ‘in employ’, ‘under the [Aborigines Protection] Act’, or living in reservations or government institutions (Rowse, 2012: 8–9). It is pertinent to recall that the identity category ‘Aboriginal’ itself is both the invention and product of European colonialism (Carter, 2006: 66). When the British first arrived in Australia, there were as many as 500 identifiable tribal groups, differentiated on the basis of kin relationships, stories and geographical associations, who spoke up to 250 distinct languages (Reece, 1987: 14). It was the arrival of the British that forged these disparate groups as ‘Aboriginal’ as such, manufacturing a common identity through colonial practices of ‘dispossession, depopulation, acculturation, segregation and institutionalisation’ (Reece, 1987: 15). The construction of ‘the Aborigines’ as an undifferentiated group is considered a central element in the process of colonising Australia, for it allowed the colonisers to picture them as ‘a feature of the landscape closely related to the fauna’ and thus without culture or claim to land (Russell, 2001: 2–3). A pan-Aboriginal identity has been embraced in many struggles, especially since the 1930s when it became apparent that Indigenous Australians constituted an identifiable political minority (Reece, 1987: 15). In many ways it nevertheless obscures important differences in the ways Aboriginal people construe themselves and their relations to others. For many Indigenous groups regional affiliation takes precedence over a common collective Aboriginal identity. As Gillian Cowlishaw (2004) notes, recent years have seen a

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revival of more regional understandings of Aboriginality where people demand recognition first and foremost as, amongst others, Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri, Koori, Noongar, Yolngu, Murri or Anangu. Cowlishaw interprets this ‘return’ to regionality as part and parcel of the pursuit of Indigenous selfdefinition. The multiplicity of Indigenous cultures is an important aspect of the Australian Aboriginal identity that is easily eclipsed by the ‘populations’ discourse. Likewise eclipsed are other diversities that characterise the contemporary Aboriginal community. For Rowse, there is an ever present danger that statistics distort Indigenous realities, particularly in terms of culturally sensitive measurement variables such as the meanings attributed to ‘household’ or ‘work’. This results in two problems, where actual deficits in wellbeing (like overcrowding) are under-recorded and issues that are not seen internally to be problems are recorded as problems, ‘warranting state intervention in order to “help” them’ (p. 12). Similarly, while socio-economic indicators of Indigenous disadvantage ‘are so outrageous that they are routinely greeted with numb acceptance’ (Pearson, 2000: 166),3 taking the Aboriginal population in such broad swathes means that the predominant picture is one of Indigenous dysfunctionality. While all Aboriginal people in Australia are disadvantaged, they are not all disadvantaged in the same ways. The ‘peoples’ idiom arguably facilitates stronger acknowledgement of internal heterogeneity (political constituencies can be diverse but this does not compromise their status as such) and equally allows for Indigenous claims to be mounted regardless of whether one lives in an urban or remote rural setting. Nonetheless, the foregrounding of ‘cultural distinctiveness’ also makes for its own problematics. ‘The “people” discourse,’ Rowse argues, ‘is tempted to model “Indigeneity” within a traditionalist straightjacket’, disallowing for more critical and dynamic understandings of Aboriginal cultures and traditions – ‘historicising “culture”’, in this regard, risks pulling up the rug from underneath the feet of Indigenous political claims (p. 27). Certainly, while older modes of defining and monitoring Aboriginality relied on the quasi-biological notions of ‘full-caste’, ‘half-caste’, ‘mixed-blood’ and even ‘quandroon-blood’ (Anderson, 2003: 45), newer modes tend to rely on notions of cultural authenticity. The external demand for authenticity haunts Indigenous peoples worldwide threatening to turn the question of cultural survival into one of cultural stasis (Levi and Dean, 2003: 3). Many settler Australians retain the mythological expectation that Aboriginal people, in order to fully qualify as Aboriginal, must be ‘untainted’ by modernity, existing in the space of ancient traditions, beliefs and practices. The emphasis on ‘authentic’ Aboriginality is problematic because it rests on certain presumptions that are not reflective of contemporary Indigenous realities. Much like Indigenous urbanisation patterns in other countries like New Zealand (Gagné, 2013), the majority of Australia’s Aboriginal people live in urban or semi-urban areas4 rather than the remote areas conjured up in images of ochre-painted dancing black bodies (Behrendt, 1998: 260).

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Similarly, the discourse of authenticity raises the question of ‘who is a “real indigenous” person’ (Smith, 1999: 72), therefore fragmenting the Indigenous community into those who can fulfil the fantasy of authentic Aboriginality and those who cannot or will not. This not only ostracises those who do not fit with the prescribed outline of Indigeneity or who occupy more ‘hybrid’ cultural or racial spaces (Paradies, 2006), but has the effect of rendering alternative modes of Indigeneity illegitimate or, minimally, questionable. Elizabeth Povinelli’s (1998) critique of the 1992 Mabo judgement and the ways in which it legally and publicly constructed Indigenous customary law around a notion of authenticity illustrates these difficulties very well. While previously states had dealt individually with questions of land rights, the High Court decision in the case of Eddie Mabo and Others v State of Queensland (1992), along with Wik Peoples v State of Queensland (1996),5 saw native title become a widely debated national matter. In Mabo, the High Court recognised the customary basis of Indigenous land claims and ruled that the concept of native title was not inconsistent with Australian common law, declaring two sources of law in Australia: ‘British legal traditions (adapted by Australian courts and legislatures) and Indigenous customs’ (Rowse, 2012: 18). The Mabo decision is widely regarded as having overturned the unofficial doctrine of terra nullius, that is, ‘that there was no recognisable legal or political organisation on the continent prior to the arrival of British settlers’ (Muldoon and Schaap, 2011: 195). Mabo undoubtedly represented one of the most significant official acts of recognition of Indigenous rights to land in recent history. However, the ways in which it positioned customary law as subject to the decisions of non-Indigenous legislators and administrators meant that Indigenous people were brought firmly back within not only the grasp of the state, but also that of the colonial demand for authenticity (p. 579). A central component of the Mabo decision was that Indigenous Australians could only claim native title interests in their land if they had maintained their traditional customs, beliefs and practices, displaying ‘that their connection with the land had been maintained, unbroken down through the years’ (Keating, 1994: 236). While the court acknowledged that such customs, beliefs and practices could change, especially as the result of adaptation to ‘new circumstances’, it was nevertheless required of claimants that they still ‘embody and perform the ideal of “tradition” and “locality”’ (p. 587). It was further held by the court that native title would cease ‘when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgement of traditional law and any real acknowledgment of traditional customs’ (Eddie Mabo and Others v State of Queensland, 1992: 43). In other words, the court contended that if Aboriginal cultures and traditions were ‘diluted’ through their interactions with other cultures and traditions, then any claims of native title would necessarily be forfeited (p. 587). For Povinelli, the fixation on the notion of tradition exposes the conditions and limits of Mabo. The demand of the court that Aboriginal traditions, beliefs and practices remain ‘undiluted’ not only presumes the possibility of

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‘authentic’ traditions, but also stands in sharp contradiction to the requirement laid out in Mabo that Aboriginal practices must not violate common law (pp. 587–8). Such a demand at once requires that Indigenous peoples do not stray from ‘tradition’, yet firmly asserts that such traditions must be mediated and limited by non-Aboriginal law. Mabo therefore makes the ‘impossible demand that indigenous people desire and identify with their cultural traditions in a way, that just so happens, to fit the national and legal imaginary’ (Povinelli, 2002: 8). Furthermore, the implicit acknowledgement of inappropriate traditional cultural practices means that ‘these prohibited practices continue to haunt all contemporary representations of Aboriginal tradition, casting an aura of inauthenticity over present-day Aboriginal performances of their culture’ (p. 588). Indigenous peoples are thus caught in a doublebind: present your ‘authenticity’ by conforming to ‘the imaginary of Aboriginal traditions’, but guard yourself from being labelled inauthentic because of your conformity to the ‘authenticity’ that is expected of you (p. 590). To point to problematic dimensions of the ‘peoples’ and ‘populations’ discourses is not to take away from the real gains for Aboriginal people that have been achieved through them. Nor is it to suggest that Aboriginal people have not been able to negotiate these dynamics without finding spaces of resistance and empowerment for themselves (Bird Rose, 1996: 36). My aim is to illustrate how the possibilities of Indigenous recognition are conditioned in very significant ways by prevailing discourses, political priorities and historical circumstances. This is of course not exclusive to Indigenous peoples. However, the significant politicisation of Aboriginal identity and issues in Australian politics – including regular mainstream debates over what constitutes ‘real’ Aboriginality6 – exacerbates the social and personal outcomes of this. It is worth quoting the following at length: In 1935 a fair-skinned Australian of part-indigenous descent was ejected from a hotel for being Aboriginal. He returned to his home on the mission station to find himself refused entry because he was not Aboriginal. He tried to remove his children but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He walked to the next where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and placed on the local reserve. During World War II he tried to enlist but was told he could not because he was Aboriginal. He went interstate and joined up as a non-Aboriginal person. After the war he could not acquire a passport without permission because he was Aboriginal. He received exemption from the Aborigines Protection Act – and was told he could no longer visit his relations on the reserve because he was not an Aboriginal. He was denied permission to enter the Returned Serviceman’s Club because he was Aboriginal. In the 1980s his daughter went to university on an Aboriginal studies grant. On the first day a fellow student demanded to know, ‘What gives you the right to call yourself Aboriginal?’ (Read, 1998: 169)

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For Peter Read (1998), this ‘extinction by legislation’ (p. 169) continues into the present day and demands bilateral interrogation of the colonial foundations of Australian citizenship. This is something that the Australian reconciliation process aspired to put into place. However, as we will see, reconciliation – in particular, its foregrounding of post-colonial national unity – is widely held to have produced its own constraints for Aboriginal recognition in Australia.

Reconciliation and recognition With native title on the national table and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody7 bringing the reality of race relations in Australia freshly into the public mind, the Australian parliament, in 1991, unanimously implemented a ten-year formal reconciliation process to be facilitated by the newly created Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. With the broad aim of encouraging respect, equality and harmony between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians, reconciliation sought to educate the non-Indigenous public into Aboriginal issues, cultures and heritage, with a particular focus on how history has shaped Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, in addition to addressing Indigenous socio-economic disadvantage in areas like health and education. The process was formally inaugurated in 1992 by then Labor prime minister Paul Keating, in an extraordinary speech delivered in Sydney’s Redfern Park.8 Keating’s vision of reconciliation squarely placed the burden of recognition on the shoulders of settler Australia. Reconciliation ‘begins’, declared Keating (2000: 61), ‘with an act of recognition’: Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. For Keating (pp. 61–2), the ‘starting point’ of a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians ‘might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians’. Only then could the nation begin with the business of building a ‘new partnership built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia’s Indigenous people’. There are close conceptual links between recognition and reconciliation. As a process which aims to transform political conflicts from conditions of enmity to good will and respect, reconciliation foregrounds the recognition of historical injustices in order to forge better present and future relations between conflicting parties (Bashir, 2011). Reconciliation has a strong moral component insofar as it acknowledges the damage that past injustices have wrought on relations of respect and esteem so as to repair them, affording the wronged party a new sense of dignity as part of a moral community. While it

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can involve a variety of measures, such as apologies, reparations, truth-telling initiatives and public commemorations, reconciliation is a deeply contested concept, with diverse ideological and linguistic meanings in different contexts (Little, 2011). Defining reconciliation in broad terms is thus important if the process is to capture political imaginations and genuinely serve as a means of conflict transformation, capable of affording parties – but particularly the aggrieved – recognition of their particular identities, histories and experiences (Schaap, 2008). As much as reconciliation is often celebrated as a progressive process that leads toward the better accommodation of difference in a given polity or community (e.g. Lederach, 1997), its distinguishing feature is the heralding of mutual relations of recognition above the acknowledgement of distinctiveness. Put differently, the recognition of difference is expressly placed in the aim of creating new or better relations. In this sense, reconciliation can be thought of as akin to Taylor’s take on the Gadamerian concept of ‘fusion of horizons’, where the recognition of difference transforms relations across cultures, expanding shared understandings and virtue (Schaap, 2004). There are two main contexts in which political processes of reconciliation are invoked. The first is as part of democratic transition processes in societies that have been ‘fractured by serious political violence’ (such as South Africa), and the second is in relation to the historical injustice experienced by minorities at the hands of the state, most often ‘colonised Indigenous ones’ (Humphrey, 2005: 203–4). While in the first context reconciliation is employed to bring about political legitimacy in the wake of a prior illegitimate regime, reconciliation in the second case takes place in, and typically at the behest of, an already established liberal democracy seeking legitimacy for its founding. Legitimacy, in other words, is sought retroactively after the state has already been fully established (Short, 2005: 269). The Australian reconciliation process falls into the latter category. Rather than seeking to create a new polity per se, which would bring together and afford equal political representation to two (or more) enemy sides, reconciliation in Australia sought to render the existing polity legitimate through an interrogation of historical injustice and extending an offer for inclusion within the newly aware and repentant polity. Accordingly, the trope of post-colonial nation building – that is, attempting to build a new Australian national identity cognisant of and able to move beyond the antagonistic relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples – was afforded discursive and political centrality, with the reconciliation process widely defined in terms of the national interest (Muldoon, 2003). While social trust between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples remains low and prejudice towards Aboriginal peoples high, there is general goodwill towards and civic support of the reconciliation process in Australia (Reconciliation Australia, 2016). This is to an important extent facilitated by its framing around nation. With high-profile public events like the Sea of Hands placed in front of Canberra’s parliament house, Sorry Books9 and the Sydney

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Harbour Bridge Walk for Reconciliation, imagining reconciliation in terms of building a positive, future-oriented post-colonial nation arguably affords a less confrontational impetus for non-Indigenous Australians to examine their collective complicity in historical injustice. The reconciliation process allowed non-Indigenous Australians, but especially white Australians, a means through which to emotionally engage the nation’s past, which does not generally ‘stem from individual, personal participation in past events but rather from a shared membership in the category of offenders’ (Maddison, 2012: 699). As Danielle Celermajer (2006) has argued, reconciliation is a difficult process because its demand for collective responsibility of historical wrongs contradicts the moral individualism of liberal jurisprudence which suggests that individuals are only responsible for actions they themselves personally commit (p. 153). In this sense, understanding nation as a ‘political culture’ (p. 162), which shapes the identities and ways of life of its members but in which they also participate and help to shape, builds a bridge between individual and collective responsibility. Settler Australians do not simply bear responsibility because of their political identity, that is, because of who they are. Rather, they bear responsibility because they participate in shaping the cultural norms of the political culture of which they are a part. For Celermajer, a similar understanding of collective guilt or shame was common in formulations of reconciliation in Australia, where a variety of commentators reflected on the ways in which Australian political culture distinguishes between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in the distribution of rights and deems Aboriginality and full citizenship incompatible (pp. 170–1).10 At the same time, there is little doubt that the national framing of the Australian reconciliation process compromised much of its critical potential as an act of recognition, contributing in part to its political derailment. Reconciliation is a demanding and conflictual process because it compels people to reckon with different and often uncomfortable versions of the past, many of which call for collective self-refashioning. In Australia, alternative readings of history and the nation through the prism of settlement/invasion significantly challenged the hegemonic centrality of white culture (Muldoon, 2003: 182), provoking a backlash from conservative quarters. The election of prime minister John Howard in 1996 solidified the polarisation of discourse and marked the beginning of the so-called ‘History Wars’ – a public debate over the interpretation of Australia’s colonial past and its implications for national identity, in which Keating and Howard sat at opposite poles. Howard can be seen as an advocate of the liberal jurisprudence Celermajer outlines. His refusal of current generations accepting guilt for past wrongs was intimately tied to a refusal to see Australia’s political culture as discriminatory. Dismissing Keating’s call at Redfern as a ‘black armband view of history’, Howard (1996) argued that ‘the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than of which we should be ashamed’. Such a view was widely taken up by conservative historians and public figures, who challenged

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the impartiality and objectivity of revisionist histories of Australian settlement (e.g. Windschuttle, 2003). The History Wars thus resulted in two strikingly different visions of the role of nation in the reconciliation process vying for hegemonic status. For Keating (2000: 63), the shared nation would arise when settler Australians could truly appreciate the ‘depth and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures’. Howard (2000: 90), in contrast, argued that true reconciliation will come when Aboriginal people join mainstream Australia and share in the same rights and obligations, with a common ‘overriding and unifying commitment to Australian institutions’. To open debate over history, for Howard, was to reopen the divisions between Australians ‘that most of us rightly believed had been reconciled long ago’ (in Gray and Winter, 1997: 1). It is significant that Howard’s vision was in large part facilitated by his distinction between ‘symbolic’ reconciliation, which he derided as a fuzzy measure of little material consequence, and ‘practical’ reconciliation, which restricted itself to addressing Aboriginal socio-economic disadvantage, that is, ‘the usual welfare regime’ (Moses, 2011: 147). By working exclusively with a ‘populations’ idiom, Howard was not only able to better lay out an assimilationist conception of national culture, but also undercut Aboriginal demands for recognition. As Rowse (2012: 203–4) suggests, an exclusive focus on socioeconomic disadvantage reinforces rather than undermines negative perceptions of Aboriginal peoples and fails ‘to imagine indigenous agency, political capacity and responsibility in positive terms’. Given this polarisation of discourse, it is of little surprise that the formal reconciliation process failed to achieve its aim of reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples by the centenary of Federation in 2001. Indeed, Paul Muldoon (2016) suggests that the longer reconciliation ‘remains the favoured trope for thinking about the future of indigenous/non-indigenous relations [in Australia], the more apparent it becomes that the settler-colonial state is divided in ways that both necessitate reconciliation and undercut the chances of achieving it’. As a means for Aboriginal recognition, however, a number of critics have maintained that positioning reconciliation in the national interest has meant that it fails to seriously account for Indigenous political claims. The nationalist emphasis of the reconciliation process, for instance, has been charged with sidelining important Indigenous concerns and issues, such as land rights, self-determination, sovereignty and the persistence of racism towards Aboriginal peoples (Gunstone, 2004). Others have similarly suggested that reconciliation is more concerned with settler desires than Indigenous needs, providing settler society a means to excuse itself of culpability in colonial injustices and alleviate its sense of guilt and shame (Gooder and Jacobs, 2000; Moran, 2002). Likewise, it has been argued that reconciliation is tokenistic and silencing insofar as it ‘is meant to validate enough of [Aboriginal] suffering … to progress with less dissent in future’ (Barta, 2008: 210). As Muldoon (2003: 187) warns, there are important differences between ‘the exigencies of nation building’, which, in seeking to craft unity, are more

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concerned with forgetting than remembering (Renan, 1990), and the interrogation of past wrongs demanded by reconciliation. The main charge I am interested in, however, is that the ideal of the postcolonial national community on which reconciliation rests is assimilative of Indigenous difference. The preservation of cultural identity is a core concern for Indigenous peoples, as I have already noted. If Aboriginal identity is not a claim to uniqueness but the premise of their political demands (Reilly, 2009), it is apparent how the injunction to forge a new, common identity may be ‘experienced as assimilation or group erasure’ (Moses, 2011: 146). Damien Short (2005: 274) argues that tying reconciliation to the rubric of a ‘united Australia … places a (colonial) ceiling on Indigenous aspirations’ because incorporating ‘Aboriginality into the cultural fabric of the settler nation weakens Indigenous claims based on their traditional “separateness” from settler culture’. Povinelli (2002) similarly contends that reconciliation is a means for the state to domesticate and absorb Indigenous alterity by putting it at the service of the dominant national imaginary. Genuine otherness is disallowed in the reconciliation process, Povinelli argues, for it requires that the difference be articulated, and rendered knowable and manageable, in relation to the nation. While the framework of the Australian reconciliation process gives Indigenous peoples a ‘right to be incorporated into the Australian nation’ it does not give them ‘a right to refuse’; likewise, it presumes that ‘Indigenous peoples wish to share in the settler state’s vision of the good life’ (Short, 2005: 274–5).

Nation, ideology and politics Such critiques have seen the reconciliation process variously indicted as ‘the latest phase in the colonial project’ (Short, 2003), representing a ‘fantasy of [settler] absolution’ (Gooder and Jacobs, 2000) and yet another instance of settler domination of Aboriginal peoples (Motha, 2007). Rather than acknowledging Aboriginal experiences, histories and demands for justice, then, reconciliation is regarded as having replicated the failure of recognition it ostensibly claimed to address. Critical scholars no doubt offer an important caution as to the social justice possibilities of reconciliation in settler colonial contexts, particularly when these are imagined in terms of a decolonising national community. Patrick Wolfe’s (1994: 93) highly influential formulation of settler colonialism as not a question of origins but the ‘primary structural characteristic of settler society’, which sets in play a historically continuous process of displacing Indigenous peoples and replacing them with settlers, makes clear that there are significant structural impediments to settler decolonisation. Likewise, his argument that settler colonialism is driven by a logic of elimination – that is, eradicating the Indigenous population in order to claim and legitimise settler control over territory – ought to make us wary of measures that would seem to undercut the particularity of Aboriginality and Aboriginal demands. For Wolfe (1994) assimilation represents the final stage

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in the logic of elimination, because, in subsuming Indigenous peoples within settler society, it deletes the basis of a distinctive identity with which claims can be made. From this perspective, the fear that reconciliation is assimilation in more palatable liberal guise is politically prudent. The Australian case would indeed seem indicative of how easily formal reconciliation processes can shift into neo-assimilationist projects à la Howard. There are also legitimate reasons as to why Indigenous peoples might want to couch their political claims in different terms (Schaap, 2008: 249). Nonetheless, the dismissal of reconciliation as ‘ultra-colonial’ and beyond redemption from a decolonial perspective (e.g. Veracini, 2011) is arguably a little too steadfast in its assessment. Muldoon (2003: 187) reminds us that ‘to admit that reconciliation can operate as an instrument of colonial power is not … the same thing as saying that it must do so’ (my emphasis). Given that ‘the concept points, by its very nature, to an historical injustice, it can never be totalised by a purely functionalist demand for order’. Put differently, because reconciliation is explicitly oriented towards questions of justice, it contains within it resources for its political contestation. Any formulation of reconciliation can be held to account for how well or how poorly it attends to past wrongs. I argue that the idea of nation as political community sets out similar precedents, that is, the extent to which the representation of the national ‘we’ fulfils democratic aspirations of horizontal membership and popular sovereignty. Paraphrasing Muldoon, while the idea of nation can operate as an instrument of colonial power, repressing Indigenous claims and operating under a mandate of assimilation, this does not mean that it necessarily does so. To the contrary, discursive invocations of the national ‘we’ can and are used to anti-colonial ends, which are not assimilative of Indigenous difference but rather situate and illuminate it. To make this clearer, I find exceedingly helpful Schaap’s (2008) distinction between ‘reconciliation as ideology’, where it is used to enforce a vision of commonality in line with the interests of the ruling class, and ‘reconciliation as politics’, where it serves as an instrument for freedom and equality. Similar to Muldoon, the problematic aspects of its emphasis on national unity temper Schaap’s view of the Australian reconciliation process, but he also believes that it would be a ‘strategic error’ to dismiss reconciliation out of hand as having no potential for radical politics (p. 249). Driving the distinction between ‘ideology’ and ‘politics’ is the Gramscian critical sensibility that: [p]olitical ideas and concepts are neither true nor false but the tools through which we make sense of our world. In law and politics, therefore, the task is not so much to discard wrong ideological concepts but to redefine them against whatever conservative connotations that may have acquired, adjust them to the project of popular politics and build them around a ‘hegemonic’ bloc. (Douzinas, 2000: 169; in Schaap, 2008: 249)

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Schaap does not suggest that there are ideological forms of reconciliation and political ones, and that our job as scholars is merely to arbitrate between them. His argument is more complex. What defines reconciliation is precisely that it is a double move, where it is both an ‘emancipatory demand [politics] and device by which an enforced commonality can be reinscribed [ideology]’ (Motha, 2007: 88). Reconciliation, for Schaap thus leads us to ‘the heart of the problem of the political (the thematisation of commonality) and the staging of politics (the representation of conflict)’ (2008: 250). If it is simultaneously ideological and political, the challenge therein lies with how to imagine commonality in such a way that allows for conflict and contestation over its meanings and relationship to social justice; keeping in mind that this is always a tentative process. The ideology/politics distinction is quite instructive in terms of understanding the Australian reconciliation process. Schaap states that reconciliation can be considered ideological to the extent that ‘its meaning is overdetermined’, for this ties (and thus limits) alternate conceptions to the dominant terms of the debate (p. 251). The ways in which the ‘practical’ versus ‘symbolic’ reconciliation dichotomy excluded alternate conceptions from entering public discourse is a case in point here. Likewise, reconciliation is ideological insofar as it posits ‘a comprehensive conception of community with which some members of society might reasonably take issue’ (p. 252). This again was something evident in mainstream settler discourses of reconciliation in Australia, which set clear parameters reinforcing the exclusion of Indigenous voices. We can think of reconciliation as political if it enables different parties to come together in an ‘overlapping dissensus’ that does not presume that political unity comes about by a shared commitment to agreedupon principles of justice, but is rather a ‘contingent possibility of politics that comes through contesting the nature of the injustice that brought the parties to the conflict together in the first place’ (p. 252). In other words, reconciliation is political to the extent that it ‘enables an agonistic politics that is potentially constitutive of political community’, through which contesting perspectives of the social world come to bear on that world, making it ‘more common to those engaged in struggle’ (p. 251). It can be argued that Keating’s speech at Redfern did precisely that, because he deferred the desire of a united national community, making it contingent on the willingness of settler Australians to acknowledge past wrongs and the validity of Aboriginal perspectives. Schaap is not explicitly concerned with the motif of national community. Yet, his reflections on the ‘we’ of political community are equally applicable to the ‘we’ of the nation. Schaap recognises that political community is never pre-existing, but rather comes into being as ‘an achievement of political action’: Because the ‘we’ cannot speak as a ‘we’, someone must claim to represent it. This representative claim inevitably entails a certain violence in

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positing community. Yet, in its invocation of the people, it may fail or succeed and, should it succeed, it may always be contested (if only in retrospect). (Schaap, 2008: 254–5) Accordingly, we may imagine the claim to represent the people to be political insofar as it ‘politicise[s] the terms of association in a divided society’ and draws attention to the contingencies and ‘political risk[s] of (re)founding a political community’ (p. 256). When the ‘we’ is spoken with the aspiration of ‘being-in-common’, as opposed to stated definitively as being already settled, it may be both allowing of difference and oriented towards the concerns of social justice. Of course, it is all too apparent that certain conceptions of community articulated in the name of justice can easily become ideological and oppressive of difference. Acknowledging that the enterprise of political community is inherently vulnerable, fragile and risky, and that there is no blueprint of an ideal political community (p. 255), nevertheless constrains its invocation to ‘legitimate a particular order in which the interests of some are privileged over those of others’ (p. 249). There needs to be a distinction made between ideological versions of national community inherent in certain conceptions of reconciliation and the possibilities of enabling more political versions of the national ‘we’. As much as the top-down call for national unity through reconciliation would seem to legitimate the interests of the Australian state (not least its proclamations to sovereignty, as we will consider in the chapter’s last section), its take-up by a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous civil society actors and organisations was resounding. This is not to suggest that state and civil society operate in separate realms. After all, for all its problems it must be recognised that the reconciliation process was initiated because of pressure from Aboriginal activists and communities for the state to take Indigenous issues seriously. No matter its location of articulation, there is an ever present possibility that multicultural politics of difference politicise the terms of association of national community. In the context of the Australian reconciliation process, the aspiration of being-in-common has great political import and is expressed precisely in terms of an aspiration, as opposed to an achievement, when it is invoked alongside Aboriginal particularity. In order to demonstrate this, I will now focus on the 2008 federal government apology to the Stolen Generations. As the matter that came to define the entire reconciliation process, the apology offers an important point of reflection for a variety of questions concerning the discursive role of nation. What I want to show is that the apology itself, and Aboriginal public responses to it, unsettled national terms of association in a variety of ways. Most significantly, they did so by pointing to the ways in which the revision of the political culture of the Australian nation is part and parcel of the recognition of Indigenous difference.

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Saying sorry The recommendation for an apology emerged out of an inquiry into the forced removal of mixed-descent Aboriginal children by state and federal agencies, commissioned by the Keating Labor government in 1995 as part of the reconciliation process. Practices of child removal occurred throughout the nineteenth century until as late as the 1970s, affecting between an estimated one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children (HREOC, 1997: 31–3). The effects of forcible removal were catastrophic for the taken children, their families and communities, and were documented in the extensive Bringing Them Home (HREOC, 1997) report that emerged from the inquiry. Bringing Them Home is harrowing reading. The multitude of personal testimonies speaks to the loss, grief and trauma of forced removal. Children were placed under the auspices of white foster families, missions and other institutions, sometimes experiencing physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of their carers, internalising an image of Aboriginal inferiority or, alternatively, denied knowledge of their Aboriginality. While the motivations behind child removal were typically tendered under the banner of the protection of children, it is apparent that protectionist discourses were informed by a variety of problematic assumptions – conviction in the superiority of European civilisation, the notion that Aborigines would soon die out, belief that miscegenation posed challenges to traditional Indigenous communities – and very often did not live up to their ostensible welfare intentions. However, as Celermajer (2006: 163) suggests, and the Bringing Them Home report makes clear, the atrocity of child removal only makes sense within the nationalist project of whitening Australia, framed by the cultural norm that Aboriginality was a ‘stain’ on the nation and incompatible with national identity. Mixed-descent children were seen as having ‘European blood’ and their fairer complexions meant that they could be more easily assimilated into Australian society, whether through natural ‘merging’ into the white social fabric or explicit quashing of Indigenous traits, languages and customs (HREOC, 1997: esp. 21–32). Ridding these children of their Aboriginality was thus regarded as the main way through which Aboriginal people could eventually achieve full citizenship within the nation; the trick, of course, was that by the time they had done so, they would be culturally if not ‘biologically’ white. Bringing Them Home was tabled in parliament in May 1997, the year after Howard’s electoral win. The newly elected Liberal government took issue with a number of the report’s findings and recommendations – most notably, its insistence that the practice of child removal be considered an instance of genocide – and rejected the call for an official state apology. Instead, Howard delivered to parliament in 1999 an infamously ill-received personal apology in the form of a statement of regret, which culminated in a number of audience members standing and turning their backs to him.11 As such, saying sorry became the lightning rod of the reconciliation process and a word loaded with redemptive meanings that organised all sorts of reconciliation projects – written

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across the sky on National Sorry Days or on t-shirts as was the case for the band Midnight Oil’s performance at the opening of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. By the time the apology was finally delivered in February 2008 by Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, who had ousted Howard the year prior, it had reached an almost mythical status and seemingly signalled a return to the rhetoric of old. Rudd’s speech was beautifully written and powerfully delivered, and seemed to mark a victory for the Australian liberal left and the reconciliation process more generally. Indeed, the apology instigated a wave of euphoria and a sense of profound healing. Members of the Stolen Generations filled the public gallery of parliament, and others gathered on the lawns outside to watch the apology broadcast live on large television screens, joining thousands of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people across the country who had converged in classrooms, offices, parks and other public spaces. This sense of profound synchronicity – that everyone was watching – meant that it truly was a nation-building moment, which signified for a great many the possibility of an ethical politics in Australia. Like the reconciliation process, Rudd’s apology was very strongly framed by a national impetus: ‘the time has now come,’ he declared, ‘for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future’. Delivered in theologicosecular language (Fagenblat, 2008), the prime minister positioned the apology as necessary to remove ‘a great stain from the nation’s soul’. What was remarkable about Rudd’s speech is how he located his role in relation to the nation. In part, he himself represented the nation as a representative of the Parliament of Australia, giving voice to the feeling of national shame and offering contrition of behalf of the settler collective. In recognising that the law sanctioned policies and practices of child removal, however, Rudd constructed the Australian nation as a moral entity that exceeds the state. ‘We, the parliaments of the nation,’ Rudd avowed, ‘are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves.’ As Michael Fagenblat (2008: 21) has argued, this statement represented an extraordinary act of sovereign contrition, precisely because the ‘sovereign is defined as that which needs no justification of itself ’. Acknowledging that laws of forcible removal were wrong and unjust undercuts the sovereign’s claims to political legitimacy, and cannot be arbitrated purely within the bounds of the law, but rather must make reference to a ‘moral point of view beyond the law’. Rudd (2008) spoke to the moral grammar of ‘fundamental human decency’ – a vague notion but one few can take issue with – as partly providing this outside point of view. ‘The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.’ But Rudd also made use of the moral grammar of the nation, declaring that the removal of Aboriginal children contravened core national values, namely that of a ‘fair go for all’. If ‘there is a deep and abiding belief in the Australian community that, for the stolen generations, there was no fair

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go at all’, the apology is the expression of ‘a pretty basic Aussie belief that says that it is time to put right this most outrageous of wrongs’. It is in this sense that Rudd ‘exercised sovereign power to re-imagine the basic character of the nation’ (Fagenblat, 2008: 19). In doing so, he admitted the failure of the Australian state to uphold the core values of the nation it claimed to represent, keeping the project of national unity honest as it were, by paying heed to a future in which both state and nation would be held accountable to all its people. This future is one in which Aboriginal peoples are accepted, respected and valued as full and equal members of the national community: It is for the nation to bring the first two centuries of our settled history to a close, as we begin a new chapter. We embrace with pride, admiration and awe these great and ancient cultures we are truly blessed to have among us – cultures that provide a unique, uninterrupted human thread linking our Australian continent to the most ancient prehistory of our planet. Growing from this new respect, we see our Indigenous brothers and sisters with fresh eyes, with new eyes, and we have our minds wide open as to how we might tackle, together, the great practical challenges that Indigenous Australia faces in the future. Let us turn this page together: Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, government and opposition, Commonwealth and state, and write this new chapter in our nation’s story together. (Rudd, 2008) Celermajer (2006: 26) calls the ‘constitutional shift in identity’ promised and enacted by the apology a process of ‘re-covenanting the national imaginary’, in which ‘by being called out of itself, towards the experience of the other … previously … excluded from our field of vision or definition of Australian identity’, the nation takes on a new moral identity. In speaking to and about nation, Rudd thus effaced neither Indigenous claims nor particularity. In large part, this is due to the unique structures of apology as a performative speech act: unlike reconciliation, which concerns itself with unity, apologies necessarily imply distance and difference (Fagenblat, 2008: 26), even as they are situated within common moral horizons. Nick Smith (2008) suggests that the act of apologising makes two core moves. First, to say sorry flags that one ‘has crossed a line’ (p. 10) – making a statement on the offender’s past identity and their freedom to ‘choose to act differently’ (Celermajer, 2008: 25). Second, in validating the harmed person’s sense of ‘having been done wrong by’, apologising recognises them as a ‘person with dignity’ rather than an obstacle to one’s self-interests (Smith, 2008: 10). In this sense, apologies are powerful, deeply social, expressions of a commitment to a shared moral community, because saying sorry is a poignant expression of shared values. Both parties acknowledge that certain values have been transgressed and, in acknowledging this transgression, reaffirm

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their commitment to them offering some hope for a shared future in which that injury or harm is not to be repeated. It is for this reason, Smith (2008: 141) argues, that the expression of mea culpa (‘I was wrong’ or, in this instance, ‘we were wrong’) is often more powerful than simply saying sorry, because it reinforces ‘a shared commitment to the moral principles underlying [the] harm’. There is an additional dimension to the act of apologising. The commitment to a shared moral community cannot presume that this community has already been enacted. Rather, part of seeing the harmed person as being of equal dignity is to recognise their freedom to reject the apology and harbour resentment for the pain they have suffered (Govier and Verwoerd, 2002: 69). As such, while apologies forge and reinforce a moral community of value, this in an important sense is tentative and relies on recognition of a distinction between the two parties. Saying sorry is a fragile and complex process, as anyone who has delivered a failed apology knows all too well. Political apologies from one collective to another only amplify these fragilities and complexities. The recognition of individual suffering can be effaced through the sublimating of individual experience within an abstract faceless collective (Celermajer, 2008: 16).12 Similarly, because political apologies generate and are generated by conflicts and controversies, the language they employ must be mediated by pragmatic concerns (Harris et al., 2006) which may potentially overwrite recognition of the aggrieved’s freedom to reject them. The attachment of the apology to the reconciliation process led some to doubt its veracity, particularly considering its position as an ideological weapon in the History Wars (e.g. Pearson, 2008).13 It is true that Rudd sought to portray reconciliation as an important expression of the national value of ‘a fair go’. However, rather than present the apology as the manifestation of the new reconciled community, Rudd was careful to ask that the apology merely ‘be accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered’ as the mark of a ‘new beginning for Australia’. In speaking to a variety of ‘wes’ – the Australian state, the nation, Aboriginal people, settler Australians, even those ‘non-Indigenous Australians … who may not fully understand why [an apology] is so important’ – it can be argued that Rudd’s new beginning not only politicised the terms of association in the national community, but also laid out new possibilities for how Indigenous particularity could shape the aspiration of being-in-common. Such a formulation also informed Aboriginal public reactions to the apology, which were not exclusively but overwhelmingly positive, regarding it as an incredibly significant act of recognition with far-reaching consequences. These responses have been collated in detail elsewhere (e.g. Celermajer and Moses, 2010; Moses, 2011), so I do not offer a comprehensive overview of them here. Instead, I would like to point to a few prominent themes that emerged consistently across Indigenous reflections on the apology. Most strikingly, Aboriginal responses did not imply that they were separate, so to speak, from the wider Australian community, but rather that they sat ‘outside of it’, like the quote from Clarke (2000: 231) indicates. And what is significant

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here is the ways in which the apology seemed to point towards a path into the community, even if the contours of that community itself would be changed. For many Aboriginal people, the apology was a particularly powerful gesture, providing acknowledgement of their suffering and helping to create more positive relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. While it would and could not undo what had happened to them, it offered hope for a future in which things would be different (see Creative Spirits, n.d.). Significant importance was attached to the theme of healing, where the possibilities for healing which the apology opened up for members of the Stolen Generations were constitutive of a wider process of national healing. For Christine Fejo-King (2008), a Larrakia woman from the Northern Territory and co-chair of the Stolen Generations alliance: [t]he Federal Government’s apology to the Stolen Generations was not just about healing for Aboriginal people. It was also about the healing of our nation. It was a proud moment when we, as a country, were mature enough to recognise a dark chapter of our history, face it, and look towards a better future for all. The act of saying sorry laid an important foundation stone for all of us to move forward together. Marcia Langton (2008), foundation chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, likewise suggested that: [t]he nation would be healed if we could consign this history to our past by admitting that it was wrong to take children from their families in order to prevent Aboriginal ways of life and traditions from continuing. I ask that all Australians understand this part of our history and recognise that such terrible wrongs must never be repeated. This process of healing was widely considered fundamentally transformative of national identity. For Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine (2008, in Creative Spirits, n.d.), ‘there has always been this hole in my heart with regards to being Australian. And today the speech by the Prime Minister was just so spot-on that it filled that little hole.’ The apology was regarded as having important implications for changing national narratives and reshaping the national agenda. Commending Rudd for his ‘more progressive and inclusive vision of Australia’, lawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt (2009: 83) hoped for the development of ‘a positive view about how we can do better in the future’. Founding chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Patrick Dodson (2008), lauded the apology’s ‘liberating potential to forge a unique national identity and purpose; one that rises above the tragedy of our colonial and racist history and enshrines respect for cultural diversity as a pivotal cornerstone of our nation’s existence’. The apology was additionally seen as critical for Aboriginal people’s sense of belonging in Australia, and the concomitant possibilities opened up by

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genuine belonging for social and political participation. Tom Calma (2008), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, put this explicitly: the apology is ‘not about black armbands and guilt. It never was. It is about belonging.’ Behrendt (2009: 84) saw the apology as an important opportunity for reflection of ‘what the political value of home means in Australia’. This sentiment was expressed in more certain terms by Aboriginal dancer Noel Tovey (2008, in Creative Spirits, n.d.): ‘no matter what our colour or our creed, at heart, from this day forward, we are all fundamentally Australian’. Similar themes of national belonging and participation were also evident in more critical responses to the apology. In her reflection on the apology two years on, Murri woman and pro-vice chancellor of Indigenous Engagement at Central Queensland University Bronwyn Fredericks (2010: 7) expressed her hope that the apology could move from beyond the symbolic to action in the following terms: I believe the lines between the margins and centre of society need to be defused if we as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are going to participate in all areas of society, and I say I want to participate without giving up what it means to me to be an Aboriginal woman. Like Moses (2011: 156) suggests, Indigenous people thus did not see the notion of national community as inherently assimilative of their difference; to the contrary, their full feeling of citizenship – that they were now empowered to ‘participate as subjects or authors of the national narrative’ – was seen as opening the space for them to make distinctive and enduring claims.14 Counter to the argument of reconciliation critics who suggested that any attempt to include Aboriginal people in the national ‘we’ is counter to full Indigenous justice, Indigenous reactions seem to indicate that they felt they could do both: their particular difference and participation ‘in the collective “we” of the Australian political nation’ were not incompatible, but rather integral to each other (p. 155). For Moses, heeding these voices helps us to move beyond the framing of Indigenous political agency in terms of a dichotomy of resistance/ co-option that seems to be the implication of many radical critiques of reconciliation (p. 146). If the charge that reconciliation is unavoidably ideological is right, then it is the case that Aboriginal people who invoke the rhetoric of national community have been duped and have absorbed the language of their own oppression. This is problematic because it comes dangerously close to the demand for cultural authenticity, which constrains Indigenous political agency to the extent that they ‘speak at the risk of being heard’ (Levi and Dean, 2003: 2).15 Moreover, this proposition can be deemed ideological itself in the sense that it legislates right and wrong modes of Indigenous political engagement, and teeters dangerously close to reproducing the colonial binaries that critics presumably seek to challenge in the first place (Moses, 2011: 155–6). In Australia, meaningful political engagement with Indigenous issues is all too often paralysed by the invocation of caricatured Left and Right positions,

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resulting in ‘debate that is at once overheated and drained of meaning, in which observing taboos is more important than exposing complex truths’ (Neill, 2002: x). Likewise, the binary of assimilation/self-determination has posed significant obstacles for the development of Aboriginal affairs policy in line with community needs (Sullivan, 2011: 2). Being cognisant of how Aboriginal recognition is shaped by and impinges on national imaginaries offers a route out of such dichotomies, helping us to imagine Indigenous political agency in positive terms. It may also afford more grounded understandings of Indigenous difference. Rather than taking refuge in outdated stereotypes or expectations of what Aboriginal people should be, engaging how Indigenous Australians (re)articulate national histories, norms, terms of association and cultural contents from the perspective of their own experiences, customs and philosophies is a genuine act of recognition affirming of both equal dignity and difference. For Ian McIntosh (2003: 295–6), one of the failings of the Australian reconciliation process must be considered its unwillingness to properly allow for Aboriginal visions of reconciliation. Such models, like the Yolngu notion of ‘membering and remembering’, present cultural survival as constitutive of coexistence. The quote from Patrick Dodson (1996) given as an epigraph to this chapter likens reconciliation to the meeting of salt water and fresh water – they may mix, but they will always be separate in their own right. The nation may not be the only ground for such a meeting, but it would seem to be a valid and important one.

Recognition and Aboriginal sovereignty Quite fairly, I may be challenged for having offered a reasonably glowing account of the apology to the Stolen Generations, focusing on ‘the moral amends it offered’ at the expense of ‘the practical amends it did not’ (Muldoon, 2009: 4). There is no doubt that the apology was extraordinary in its moral amends. While political apologies are often derided as mere symbolism, it is important to recognise that symbolic and communicative acts have significant consequences. The revaluation of identities, histories and relationships they compel go into documents, textbooks, curricula, laws and public declarations (Celermajer, 2006: 175), fashioning a ‘we’ for future generations to identify with (Schaap, 2008: 256). Nearly ten years on, however, the radical transformation tendered by the apology seems to have been overly hopeful. It is pertinent to note that the apology was delivered around the same time as the Northern Territory intervention, which saw army and police mobilised to implement a number of restrictive measures on Aboriginal communities and required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act. The top-down character of the intervention, which proceeded without consultation, appeared to insert Aboriginal issues back into a discourse of rights paternalism rather than recognition or reconciliation (Altman and Hinkson, 2007). It was, however, the question of compensation (or more accurately, the lack thereof) that soured the initial positive reactions of many Aboriginal people. Of

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the 54 recommendations made in the Bringing Them Home (1997) report, 34 addressed the issue of reparations; of these, 11 were directly concerned with monetary compensation. Yet, the question of reparations became a political football of sorts,16 and no compensation fund or reparations tribunal was established, as had been recommended in Bringing Them Home and the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee inquiry into the report held in 2000. For many Aboriginal people, it was precisely this element that most compromised the apology’s integrity. In a scathing piece on the apology published in The Australian newspaper, Pearson (2008) asks ‘which is more sincere: to say “we will not apologise to the Stolen Generations and we won’t pay compensation”; or “we will apologise but we won’t pay compensation”? For Pearson, ‘blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas will keep the money’. In the absence of a compensation fund or the like, those who wish to seek reparation must go through the courts, which is a harrowing, costly and difficult process. This does not only put courts in the position of having to arbitrate history, but as Alex Reilly has argued (2009) ‘psychologically … pit[s] the government against those bringing actions’. This is by no means in keeping with either the sentiment of the apology or the government’s acknowledgement that the removal of children was ‘ill-motivated and completely misconceived’. An increasing number of critical voices have argued that full justice for Indigenous Australians does not require ‘re-evaluating who should be included’, as per the reconciliation process, but rather ‘what they should be included in’ (Celermajer and Moses, 2010: 49, my emphasis). The Aboriginal claim to sovereignty is precisely that which has come to inform the latter, because it demands radical revision of the Australian political community. As Patrick Dodson (2000: 266) affirms, ‘the sovereign position that Aboriginal peoples assert has never been ceded. Recognition starts from the premise that terra nullius and its consequences were imposed on Aboriginal peoples’. Saying sorry, and the reconciliation process more broadly, may have offered reform of Australian citizenship, but they did not unsettle, but rather underscored, its legitimacy. Furthermore, while the apology represented an act of sovereign contrition, it was still delivered in the name of the absolute sovereign. In their analysis of the apology to the Stolen Generations, Muldoon and Schaap (2011: 184) submit that its failings as an act of recognition were directly connected to this question of Aboriginal sovereignty. Muldoon and Schaap draw on the work of Patchen Markell (2003: 25–6), who reminds us that as much as states are typically portrayed as the ‘transparent medium through which people exchange recognition’ or ‘a mediating institution … with the capacity to resolve struggles for recognition’, states, too, are deeply implicated in social and political relations of recognition and thoroughly dependent on recognition of their claims to sovereignty. Rudd’s apology, Muldoon and Schaap (2011: 185) argue, may have been ‘an act of recognition of the suffering of Aboriginal people but [it was also] a demand for recognition of the sovereignty of the Australian state and the unity it presupposes’. The

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apology revealed itself to be an appeal for recognition for its sovereignty over Indigenous Australians, when it is precisely their claim to competing sovereignty that is at the core of their misrecognition in the Australian settler state. Arguably, it was this unwillingness to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty that meant the apology was unable to account for the charge of genocide or engage reparations through anything but the Australian common law courts, because both of these would require reconsidering the absolute sovereignty of the state (Reilly, 2009). There are multiple ways in which Indigenous sovereignty can be formulated (Behrendt, 2012) and there is often a great deal of confusion as to its particular meanings and implications (Davis, 2012). Nevertheless, sovereignty has become central to many current struggles for Aboriginal justice, most stridently the call for a treaty.17 Given that the formal reconciliation process was offered as an alternative to failed negotiations for a treaty in the 1980s, many critics have suggested a treaty holds far more radical promise for full justice for Australia’s Indigenous peoples than the reconciliation process ever did. For their part, Muldoon and Schaap (2011: 196) assert that the politics of sovereignty and reconciliation are complementary and necessarily invoked together if we are guided by the ideal of reciprocal recognition. I want to conclude this chapter by suggesting that my analysis speaks more to debates over sovereignty than may seem to be the case. Because treaties take place between sovereign parties, a treaty would appear to underscore the existence of two (or perhaps more) nations in Australia – a settler one and an Indigenous one. It is precisely the fear that the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty would fracture the nation that has framed many negative responses to the call for a treaty; Howard, for instance, was adamant in his view that a ‘nation … does not make a treaty with itself ’ (in Bennan et al., 2004: 308). While it may mean that the Australian state will have to recognise its own identity differently (Muldoon and Schaap, 2011: 196), it is not apparent that discourses of common nationhood are counterproductive in the struggle for a treaty. To the contrary, the aspiration of national unity could afford this struggle significant rhetorical and political impetus and arguably already has in a variety of ways. George Williams (2014: 5), for instance, suggests that a treaty ‘would finally unite us as one people’. If Aboriginal distinctiveness and full membership in the Australian national community are not contradictory impulses as has often charged, there need be no inherent incompatibility between speaking to a national ‘we’ and struggling for a treaty. Perhaps the challenge for us is to imagine the type of political culture needed for the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty to be treated as a serious question in the constitution of national identity.

Notes 1 Australia’s Indigenous peoples are made up of two distinct cultural groups, Aboriginals from mainland Australia (including the southern island-state of Tasmania) and Torres Strait Islanders from the northernmost tip of the state of

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2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16

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Queensland. Following convention, I will henceforth refer to this group as ‘Aboriginal Australians’, occasionally interchanging with ‘Indigenous Australians’. For instance, the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, although legally non-binding, has had significant rhetorical import for Indigenous claims. The most staggering is the ten-year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, although this has lowered from a 17-year discrepancy in the last decade or so (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2015). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2011) estimates that about one third of Aboriginal people live in major cities, with nearly 44 per cent living in inner and outer regional centres and 20 per cent in remote or very remote areas. In the Wik decision, which expanded on Mabo, the High Court ruled that pastoral leases did not necessarily extinguish native title. Perhaps the most infamous example is the case of right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt who published a series of articles in 2009 accusing ‘fair-skinned’ individuals of claiming Aboriginality for political and social clout. Bolt was taken to the Federal Court in 2010 for racial vilification and found to have contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (ABC News, 2011). The Commission was set up in 1987 to investigate a rising number of complaints that Indigenous prisoners were dying in suspicious circumstances in police cells, with an official report published in 1991. While the Commission recommended that incarceration be used as a last resort, Indigenous incarceration rates have continued to be staggeringly disproportionate at 1,663 per 100,000, compared to 139 per 100,000 for non-Aboriginals (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005). Redfern is a well-known centre of Aboriginal affairs, with a portion of the suburb administered by the Aboriginal Housing Company. http://aiatsis.gov.au/collections/collections-online/digitised-collections/sorry-books. Celermajer (2006: 171) suggests that this means we can continue to speak of some transfer of responsibility or shame to settler Australians so long as Indigeneity is a marker in the distribution of rights and citizenship. She does not, however, reflect on what the affording of group-specific rights for Aboriginal peoples may mean in terms of collective responsibility. Howard used this as an opportunity to reinforce his argument that present generations of Australians should not have to take responsibility for the actions of their predecessors. Rudd made a point to put a human face on the Stolen Generations by telling the story of Nanna Nungala Fejo, who was taken from her family and community by white welfare men in the 1930s. It is relevant to note, however, that the motion to apologise was bipartisan and unanimously supported by the Australian Parliament. The demand for national inclusion and full citizenship historically informed much Aboriginal activism throughout the twentieth century (see McGregor, 2011). Levi and Dean (2003) explain this in the following terms: to engage with the mainstream is seen as conceding to the dominant or compromising Indigenous alterity, yet to not engage is to risk further abuse and exploitation and be rendered ‘invisible to allies and sources that could aid them in their struggles for political, social and cultural survival’ (p. 2). The apology speech made by past opposition leader Brendan Nelson is indicative of the polemical role played by the issue of monetary compensation for the victims of the Stolen Generations. On the one hand, Nelson’s speech was a landmark: in providing bipartisan support for the apology, Nelson presented a considerable shift from previous party policy. On the other hand, his speech remained significantly close to old party lines. His categorical statement that ‘[t]here is no compensation fund, nor should there be’ was a significant pivot point in his speech.

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17 Australia is the only Commonwealth country without a treaty with its Indigenous peoples.

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Thinking postcolonial citizenship

Contrary to many common presumptions about the compatibility of multicultural politics and the idea of nation, this book has sought to illuminate the ways in which nation is a useful and politically productive category in minority struggles for recognition. It has further aimed to illuminate how, in demanding that their difference be recognised, minorities rearticulate ideas of national identity, culture and belonging and thus unsettle the presumed centrality of the imagined national – a process I have called postcolonial citizenship. The book has taken a relatively systematic approach to this task. I have endeavoured to show that it is both theoretically tenable and empirically astute, variously reading through debates on nations and nationalism, political theories of recognition and, finally, claims for recognition from Muslim and Aboriginal Australians. In this concluding chapter, I want to offer some reflections on the concept of postcolonial citizenship itself. If it is incumbent on any new conceptualisation to demonstrate its use-value in comparison with other frameworks, it is also necessary to engage its salience within wider theoretical debates. Accordingly, this chapter seeks to buttress what is unique to my account of postcolonial citizenship and also to underscore its contribution to postcolonial theory more broadly. As a relatively short chapter, I will only touch upon ideas. But like all conclusions, I hope that it may nevertheless point towards spaces for further development and future articulations. Firstly, the chapter examines postcolonial citizenship alongside understandings of multicultural citizenship. To be sure, multiculturalism is a highly contested and often ambivalent term. It may be used relatively uncontroversially as merely describing the fact of pluralism and social diversity. Multiculturalism as a normative framework concerned with state acknowledgement and accommodation of minority cultural differences, however, would appear to have fallen decisively out of fashion. Unlike Australia, where it is both an official policy and a largely taken-for-granted aspect of national life, multiculturalism has very different meanings in other Western contexts and is more typically regarded with suspicion, if not palpable disfavour (Canada is the main exception here). This is particularly the case in Europe, where multiculturalism is not only widely considered to have failed but has also been

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quite famously proclaimed ‘dead’ by various heads of state, including German chancellor Angela Merkel and former British prime minister David Cameron. Additionally, multiculturalism has been awarded the dubious honour of being equally derided by scholars on the political Left and Right, suffering ‘a fate reminiscent of that suffered by “socialism”’, wherein, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (2012: 96–7) suggest, the ‘call to fuse political democracy with economic equality was dismissed by some on the left as too soft and co-optive and denounced by the right as merely another form of “totalitarian communism”’. Variously seen as fragmenting, divisive, superficial, co-opting, too diverging from issues of economic inequality or even redundant, multiculturalism is all too often approached tentatively, and with a great deal of trepidation. I thus undertake this discussion with an awareness of the loaded-ness of the term multiculturalism, its wildly diverging meanings depending on context and the charged debates surrounding it. At the same time, it is fair to say that the ‘death’ of multiculturalism has been greatly overstated, and is more rhetorical flourish that accurate observation. Political denunciations of multiculturalism are more often than not guided by different interests and concerns, where multiculturalism comes to be code for ‘immigration’ or more pertinently ‘Islam’ (Ivison, 2010). The vast majority of Western countries continue to pursue ‘multiculturalist’ policies if not in name then intent, which are concerned with accommodating religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity, instituting anti-discrimination measures and affording legal exemptions to certain groups (Uberoi, 2008: 405). These measures vary greatly from context to context and are shaped by unique histories of immigration as well as ‘long-standing nation-specific ways of recognising and managing diversity’ (Bowen, 2011). But they can broadly be seen as emerging from the same point of origin, that is, the recognition that modern states are comprised of a variety of cultural groups and that some measure of accommodation and state support for difference is crucial to integration. In its most general sense, multicultural citizenship, as a differentiated form of citizenship in which individuals are not treated as abstractly uniform but embodied representatives of group identities, acknowledges these realities. Citizenship is not merely a legal category affording a formal identity, but denotes the participatory dimensions of belonging to a political community (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 44). Ideas of multicultural citizenship have been, and continue to be, crucial to facilitating the equal membership and political participation of cultural minorities, even as their particular expressions are historically and nationally contextual. They have also been integral to reimagining discourses and symbols of belonging, as well as collective identities and the commonalities presumed to bind a political community together (Modood, 2007). Multiculturalist scholars have developed rich and nuanced normative accounts of multicultural citizenship (e.g. Kymlicka, 1995; Parekh, 2000; Modood, 2005), which my approach to postcolonial citizenship is not intended to supplant. As an interpretive frame more than anything, postcolonial

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citizenship cannot deal directly with questions of policy nor does it speak to specific historical, legal and social strategies for dealing with difference (even as I have developed it with reference to the Australian context). Where postcolonial citizenship can be a useful supplement to multicultural citizenship, however, is in its emphasis on the entanglement of national culture, identity and belonging with multicultural politics. On the one hand, multiculturalism has long been charged with focusing on difference at the expense of commonality, presuming that intercultural interactions and social relations are static and relatively stagnant. In underscoring how politics of recognition are discursively intertwined with and inseparable from conceptions of political community, postcolonial citizenship shows how multicultural struggles are actively engaged in debating, reinterpreting and rearticulating commonality – and it does so in a way that highlights dissensus, disagreement and controversy. On the other hand, postcolonial citizenship facilitates explicit reflection on the dynamics and discontinuities of national identity in culturally diverse settings. Multiculturalists are often staunch advocates of robust, albeit inclusive, national identities, but this is most typically left to top-down questions of policy or state nation-building efforts. My account of postcolonial citizenship highlights how minorities themselves are involved in the creation of more inclusive national identities as well as the critical intent underlying this process. This last dimension brings into clearer view the analytical value of postcolonial citizenship as an interpretive frame beyond the Australian context. Specifically, it demonstrates how the politicisation of cultural diversity involved in minority claims for recognition necessarily compels a diversification of national culture, something that holds even in countries without official policies of multiculturalism. Secondly, the chapter reflects on the significance of my understanding of postcolonial citizenship to contemporary postcolonialism. Like debates over the propriety of the ‘post’ in postcolonial (e.g. Shohat, 1992), it seems to be a regular postcolonialist pastime to announce that postcolonial theory has reached an analytical impasse (e.g. Young, 1995: 163; Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 186). In employing postcolonial insights to interpret the social justice impetus of minority struggles for recognition, it should be evident that I believe that postcolonial theory, in particular its commitment to challenging Eurocentrism and Western hegemony, remains valuable for understanding the forms and political expressions of contemporary social and cultural diversity. Nonetheless, I do believe that the widespread postcolonial denunciation of nation presents some limitations for not just postcolonial analysis, but postcolonial politics more broadly. Tracing the ways in which cultural minorities in the West challenge, contest and rearticulate conceptions of national community enables postcolonial theorists to see nation in more productive terms as a legitimate site of anti- and postcolonial struggle. Following materialist critiques of hegemonic postcolonial theory, I suggest that it also affords a means of tethering postcolonialism’s ‘grand’ categories like the West and non-West, Occident and Orient. Given the importance of the relationship between

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change and continuity in postcolonial theory, exploring how cultural diversity changes conceptions of national identity, culture and belonging helps us to understand how global realities and transnational solidarities have transformed people’s lives and experiences as well as the meanings they attach to political community. It additionally assists us to ensure that our analyses are attuned to shifting social realities as opposed to forcing reality to fit into a predetermined model. This is especially important in the contemporary context of populist nationalisms, where the old lines of identity and difference do not seem to hold as strongly as they once did. Finally, I come to the role of nation in contemporary postcolonial politics. One of the most radical aspirations of anti-colonial and postcolonial scholars is that, in describing the world from non-dominant perspectives, they may contribute to remaking it. The astounding take-up in recent years of postcolonial arguments, approaches and insights in critical popular culture and Leftist politics should be testament to the power of scholarship in guiding claims for social justice and a variety of political projects. But in the presentday context, deeming all nationalisms imperialist and any appeal to nation as invariably suspect may not only serve to feed increasing political polarisation, but may overlook a critical site of resistance and anti-colonial struggle. As I conceive of it, postcolonial citizenship is not a prophylactic against problematic nationalisms, but rather a guard against the polarisation of discourse relating to these pressing political issues.

Multicultural citizenship and postcolonial citizenship as supplement As a response to the ways in which globalisation and increasing transnational migration have diversified contemporary polities, multicultural citizenship is concerned with integrating cultural minorities into the fabric of political community as a means to foster commitment to democratic ideals of equality, autonomy and inclusion (Fernandez, 2008). It is thus framed by more substantive notions of citizenship as full membership in a political community, as opposed to merely a legal status conferring of certain rights and duties. Whereas T.H. Marshall’s (1963) account of substantive citizenship, wherein civil and political rights are supplemented by social welfare rights, was driven by the aim of levelling class differences to extend basic individual rights, multicultural citizenship adds cultural rights into the mix as an important element of political membership. In acknowledging that cultural minorities have rights to ‘symbolic presence and visibility’, ‘dignifying representation’ and to the ‘propagation of identity and maintenance of lifestyles’ (Pakulski, 1997: 80), multicultural citizenship is entangled with the gradual political shift away from policies of assimilation in favour of a more nuanced approach to social cohesion. Rather than forcing all citizens into a one-size-fits-all model, multicultural citizenship is grounded in the presumption that the granting of group-specific rights, which may include national and Indigenous minorities (Kymlicka, 1995) but most typically relates to the ethnic, cultural and

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religious diversity produced by immigration, is integral to fostering a sense of commonality amongst citizens and a sense of substantive belonging for minority groups. Multiculturalists have lauded the social and political significance of cultural diversity from a variety of perspectives. These range from the communitarian assumption that cultures are valuable because they provide the rich context in which choices are made meaningful and viable (Kymlicka, 1995) to the argument that cultural diversity is a social good in itself because it creates opportunities for encounters across difference and thus gives us opportunities to discover more about ourselves and about others (Parekh, 2000). Conceptions of multicultural citizenship have a transformative dimension, insofar as they seek to ‘transform the way dominant majorities have treated minorities within their boundaries, as well as the way minority groups have conceived of their claims’ (Ivison, 2010: 12). My understanding of postcolonial citizenship takes much from the idea of multicultural citizenship, particularly with regard to the significance of transforming majority/minority relations. Yet, it is significant that multicultural citizenship has been challenged for failing to deliver on its aspiration for social cohesion and better integration of cultural minorities (Fernandez, 2008). Instead of promoting a richer sense of belonging through the differentiated application of rights, the charge is that multicultural citizenship has served to overemphasise difference, in effect fragmenting social groups and undercutting the common identity and shared public culture substantive citizenship requires. Furthermore, it has been argued that, contrary to transforming relationships between cultural minorities and majorities, multicultural citizenship has merely served to ‘freeze’ cultural differences and their respective positions in social relations of power. Something like this critique is common in the debate between ‘interculturalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ which has come to the fore in recent years. Ted Cantle defines the concept of interculturalism as being: about the creation of a culture of openness which effectively challenges the identity politics and entrenchment of separate communities, based upon any notion of ‘otherness’. But, it is also a dynamic process in which there will be some tensions and conflicts, as a necessary part of societal change in which people are able to positively envision ideas for multicultural and multifaith societies and where diversity and globalisation are recognised as permanent features of society, to be embraced, rather than feared. (2012: 143–4) The interculturalist concern is thus that, in seeking to accommodate difference, multiculturalism has ended up preserving it at the expense of intercultural communication, dialogue and a ‘synthesis’ of diversity into a robust and cohesive whole (Meer and Modood, 2012). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to engage the interculturalism/ multiculturalism debate in any further detail, suffice to say that

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interculturalism remains for the most part more a rhetorical and political challenge to multiculturalism than a developed political theory (Kymlicka, 2012). Interculturalism no doubt resonates far more than multiculturalism in certain contexts – most notably northern Europe – and thus does important work in garnering social support for cultural diversity (Taylor, 2012). Nonetheless, many of its claims about the ghettoisation produced by policies of multiculturalism and the supposed incapacity of multiculturalist theory to engage questions of integration and societal cohesion are, to put it quite simply, wrong (see Kymlicka, 2007; Meer and Modood, 2012). And it is in this context that I think postcolonial citizenship can serve as a useful supplement to multicultural citizenship. As I have sought to lay it out, postcolonial citizenship is a means to engage the social dynamics and political impetus underlying multicultural struggles for recognition, which cannot be understood without reference to the wider political culture within which they take place. Recognition is indeed a powerful framework with which to engage multicultural politics, precisely because it foregrounds their relational aspects (see Chapter 3). But as I have aimed to show, this relationality is, to a powerful extent, located within a common space of political community; indeed, the necessary connections between misrecognition as a source of conflict and recognition as a political remedy mean that questions of political community and claims to difference are effectively inextricable from each other. It is thus not necessarily the case that multicultural citizenship cannot account for a ‘culture of openness’ as Cantle suggests, but more that this must be seen as an achievement of political action and political struggle as opposed to simply an ethical commitment to envision diversity as a positive aspect of contemporary societies. Furthermore, postcolonial citizenship stresses that the creation of such a common culture in which there is space for difference is not a consensual process, but rather forged through demands for social justice and thus entails asking difficult questions about the identity and culture of a given political community. In claiming recognition, minorities variously demand social engagement with past injustices, racism and prejudice, exclusionary narratives, histories of empire and present neo-imperial realities; in short, uncomfortable truths about political culture that need reckoning with if we are to live together as a genuinely multicultural community. As such, they seek alternative visions of political community not founded on exploitation, oppression and discrimination, but rather on freedom, inclusiveness, democracy and justice (Gilroy, 2008: 663). It would be remiss to imagine that all minority struggles for recognition necessarily promote democratic ideals. This is something that liberal feminists have cautioned us against, even as many of their presumptions regarding minority and majority cultures have been critiqued (see Chapter 5). From a postcolonial perspective, we must certainly avoid romanticising minority political claims as inherently emancipatory. Nevertheless, it is critical that we see multicultural politics of recognition as essential to the development of democratic public cultures in general, where the politicisation

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of cultural difference in social justice struggles unavoidably compels questions about who ‘we’ are and where ‘our’ limits may lie. Multicultural citizenship has been challenged for undermining national identity, particularly by conservatives who are concerned that it compromises the distinctiveness of national cultures. Varun Uberoi (2008: 404) lists the three common charges leveraged against multiculturalism from this perspective: first, such policies are believed ‘to make people focus on their cultural identities instead of their national one, thus making the latter unimportant to them’; second, multiculturalism is seen as ‘reduc[ing] what members of the nation share to the extent that they do not share enough to share a national identity’; and third, multiculturalism is regarded as rendering ‘the content of a national identity … vague’. Contrary to the presumption that multiculturalism is anti-nation per se, many multiculturalists are defenders of national identities, even as they stress that they must be open to difference. Tariq Modood, for instance, argues that national identities must be robust and flexible enough to counter-balance emotional loyalties to other identities. In his words: it does not make sense to encourage strong multicultural or minority identities and weak common or national identities; strong multicultural identities are a good thing – they are not intrinsically divisive, reactionary or subversive – but they need the complement of a framework of vibrant, dynamic, national narratives and the ceremonies and rituals which give expression to a national identity. It is clear that minority identities are capable of exerting an emotional pull for the individuals for whom they are important. Multicultural citizenship, if it is to be equally attractive to the same individuals, requires a comparable counterbalancing emotional pull. (Modood, 2007) Bhikhu Parekh similarly sees the reimagining of national community to include and normalise minorities as well as their particular political claims to be essential to the effectiveness of multicultural policies (see Uberoi, 2015: 512–13). As he argues, ‘the shared view of national identity has a particularly important role in a multicultural society because of its greater need to cultivate a common sense of belonging among its diverse communities’ (Parekh, 2000: 231). The importance of relatively inclusive national identities in ensuring the successful take-up of multiculturalism has been noted by a number of multiculturalists, who have stressed the value of multicultural nation-building efforts (e.g. Moran, 2011). Like postcolonial citizenship, then, multicultural citizenship does not deny the significance of national identity in forging a sense of commonality and cohesion for diverse citizenries. It is likewise engaged in a critique of ‘the myth of homogenous and monocultural nation-states’ (Castles, 2000: 5) and, in doing so, tacitly acknowledges that nations are political creations rather than cultural inheritances (see Chapter 2). At the same time, however, it is the

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case that many such accounts of multicultural citizenship are more often than not top down, focusing on political discourse regarding making national identities more inclusive (Uberoi and Modood, 2012) or how multicultural policy itself changes national identities (Uberoi, 2008). Postcolonial citizenship’s bottom-up emphasis on exploring how minorities rearticulate ideas of national identity and culture in their struggles for recognition helps to shift the focus away from the status and habitus of citizenship – that is, how states and other institutions construct and enact ideas of national identity – towards acts of citizenship, in which actors struggle to fill the formal status of national identity with substantive meaning or, alternatively, define what being a national means (Isin, 2008: 16). This shift in focus is important for a couple of key reasons. Firstly, top-down efforts at (re)defining national identity are significant (see Chapter 6 for example), but they may easily lend themselves to charges of social engineering and from a critical perspective are typically received with some trepidation. Secondly, exploring how people take up and put to use discourses of nation and national identity enables a far more purposeful and dynamic reading of multicultural identity politics. Engin Isin (2008: 17–8) suggests that focusing on acts of citizenship brings into view the ways in which new identities and subjectivities are formed through claims making; the ‘difference between habitus and acts’, in this sense, ‘is not merely one of temporality but also a qualitative difference that breaks habitus creatively’. Accordingly, postcolonial citizenship allows us to trace the resonance and revision of dominant ideas of national community while locating groups claiming recognition, not only the state or its institutions, as active agents in bringing multicultural realities to bear on national culture. It is this dimension of postcolonial citizenship that underscores its interpretive value outside of the Australian context. Australia, as I have acknowledged, does not only have an official policy of multiculturalism but also a distinct conception of multicultural national identity that arguably means that minorities can ‘speak’ more directly to imaginings of national community in their demands for recognition. Nevertheless, if we are to foreground the relationship between multicultural political claims and the revision of national identity and culture this insight most certainly can hold even in countries without official policies of multiculturalism or where multiculturalism is regarded as highly problematic. It is evident that contesting exclusionary conceptions of national identity is an important component of recognition struggles in general; a group like Les Indigènes de la République in France, for instance, or Berlin’s Gorki Theatre are very much invested in challenging dominant understandings of the national ‘we’. Naturally, these struggles have their own peculiar resonances and meanings because they are framed by unique histories and social circumstances – Les Indigènes is directly concerned with confronting the colonial roots of French racism whereas the Gorki Theatre is framed by the very German notion of post-migrantische Gesellschaft. But I think that there are common elements to these respective struggles. Both compel a re-examination of what it means to be ‘French’ or ‘German’

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and, like Muslim and Aboriginal politics in Australia, seek to dislodge hegemonic visions of what a ‘real’ national is. Of course, I do not want to claim that my conceptualisation of postcolonial citizenship has universal applicability. Most certainly, however lucid to cultural particularities we may be, there are always some meanings that are not easily translatable and come along unannounced. There is little doubt that my account of postcolonial citizenship is developed through Australian eyes. Nonetheless, I submit that it has broad analytical value elsewhere, if only because it is able to underscore the ways in which the politicisation of cultural diversity disrupts, unsettles and rearticulates the dominant grammar of national culture.

Postcolonial citizenship and postcolonialism In some ways, my attempt to throw a postcolonial cast over multicultural politics of recognition is very much in keeping with dominant trends in postcolonial scholarship. As Spivak (2003: 82) notes, ‘metropolitan multiculturalism [is] the latter phase of dominant postcolonialism’, insofar as the term ‘postcolonial’ is deemed to refer to the massive waves of migration from the periphery to the metropole that followed decolonisation. Thinking multiculturalism through the lens of postcolonialism, as a number of postcolonial scholars have noted, brings into view how cultural difference is not a neutral category, but rather shaped by prevailing patterns of representation which have roots in European colonialism; it also allows us to grasp the hierarchical relationship between difference and the norm in historical terms (e.g. Gilroy, 2008; see also Chapters 3 and 4). This is particularly crucial in the context of minorities like Muslims and Indigenous peoples, my two case studies in this book, for whom colonial histories and neo-colonial realities invariably figure in conceptions of difference and political claims as well as the relationships between them and the geo-political and cultural imaginary we call ‘the West’. At the same time, the way in which I have sought to develop postcolonial citizenship goes beyond what Spivak (2003: 84, 116) rather derisively terms the celebration of the contributions of ‘New Immigrant Groups’ under the guise of a ‘politics of identity’. Focusing on the relationality of multicultural politics of recognition, I have instead considered how the postcolonial aims of dislodging Eurocentrism and Western hegemony play out in the imagined space of the nation. Rather than seeing struggles for recognition as mere expressions of identity politics and their relatively inward-looking focus, postcolonial citizenship considers them crucial expressions of equal citizenship and firm declarations of belonging to a political community. This book has already noted the relative ambivalence of postcolonial theory in general towards the ‘nation thing’ (Spivak, 2009: 79). In suggesting that postcolonial citizenship entails the rearticulation of dominant national imaginaries I do not intend to imply that all such struggles are only and exclusively directed towards the nation. There is a critical need for empirical work that can fill out the contours of the particular relationships of belonging

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and affiliation minorities feel towards the nation, and these will no doubt be markedly different depending on context. Yet, recognition politics are decisively public politics, and the persistence of nationalism means that public cultures are more often than not imagined as national cultures, particularly as they pertain to questions of citizenship. Moreover, the diversification of contemporary polities in the West means that these politics invariably have a transnational dimension, wherein they speak to spaces beyond the borders of the nation-state – facilitating and strengthening global alliances and international solidarities, enhancing intercultural knowledges and competencies, opening up outside perspectives on national cultures, bringing the international elements involved in the forming of national identities (Chrisman, 2003: 107) to bear on domestic politics. In this regard, the nation remains one of our most accessible sites from which to examine how the ‘repeated dialect of uniformity and specificity, of world culture and national culture, of family and of people’ (Brennan, 1995: 173) unfolds in the contemporary era. In this global age of politicised cultural diversity, the fact that the national is never purely national is clearer than ever before. Postcolonial citizenship, as I conceive of it, makes this strikingly clear, even as it takes national identity, culture and belonging as its point of reference and site of analysis. In spite of the dominant postcolonial preference for an enlarged frame of imagination, I think that tracing the continuities and discontinuities of national formations paradoxically affords us a powerful means of thinking the world from an enlarged perspective – not least because it helps us to ground our analyses in material struggles. Postcolonial theory, in general, deals in grand categories and great imaginaries and in trying to read the complex social, cultural and political conditions forged by European colonialism it is tempting to lapse into shorthand. There is a striking regularity to the particular ideological formations produced by different European colonialisms, as Edward Said (1978) showed us so convincingly in Orientalism and the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies has underscored (Veracini, 2010). But, as Stephen Slemon (1995: 52) reminds us, ‘resistances to colonial power always find material presence at the level of the local’. Accordingly, to quote Laura Chrisman (2003: 120), it is ‘only by breaking down the category of “the West” into its national constituents [that] cultural criticism [can] generate a methodology fully adequate to anticolonial opposition’. I have sought to take this insight seriously in my account of postcolonial citizenship. Flattening the historical, cultural, social and political specificities of different postcolonial contexts and conditions (and different colonial projects for that matter) does not assist us in coming to terms with how colonial imaginaries and ideologies take root. Nor does it, I suggest, help us to engage how these are challenged and transformed by political struggles and claims for social justice. The scholar who speaks only in the broad terms of reference of ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ without filling these with specific historical and national contents risks cashing in on precisely the imaginary they seek to undermine. Like Chandra Mohanty (2003: 87) emphasises, there is a critical need for the

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postcolonial scholar to challenge the ‘feigned homogeneity of the West and what seems to be the discursive and political stability of the West-East divide’. Postcolonial citizenship helps us to do precisely this. Multicultural politics of recognition, I have argued, contest the power relations that deem some groups more ‘national’ and others less so – and it cannot be neglected that, in Western societies, these are powerfully tied to notions of the West and its Others. The meanings of the West as an imaginary have no doubt diversified along with Western societies. In what ways this has may have destabilised or, alternatively, strengthened the notion of the West arguably remains to be seen. But taking minority political struggles as directly impinging on conceptions of national culture, identity and belonging in the West is one way through which we can engage this dynamic, as well as situate it in time and space. I would like to conclude this book by going back to its beginning. A significant part of the critical impetus underlying my project has been the strikingly brazen – and exceedingly problematic – re-entry of nation into contemporary Western politics. The resurgence of populist nationalisms across much of the Western world seems to be threatening the notion of cultural diversity as a social good as much as the idea that multicultural citizenship plays an important part in democracy. It is reasonable to speculate that precisely the dynamics I have engaged in this book may have played some role in this. If postcolonialism’s ‘voyage in’ (Said, 1994) provoked a conservative backlash in the 1990s, then it is fair to say that the increasing visibility and greater social power of minorities, particularly in terms of acts of collective self-definition, may have provoked its own conservative counterattack. The rearticulation of national imaginaries and challenges directed towards hegemonic national identities and cultures has indeed taken place at a relatively breathless pace and this, combined with the uncertainties of globalisation, has no doubt compelled many to take refuge in old ideas of fixed, bounded nationhood. Yet, it would be remiss of us to interpret the rise in populist nationalisms as purely a ‘white’ phenomenon, a shoring up of Western civilisation or a revaluing of colonial histories and presents as not evidence of our failings but signs of our strength. What if, as my account of postcolonial citizenship suggests, the diversification of national identities and cultures has already happened to some degree? What if we are to accept that conceptions of national community have already changed in part as a response to ever more visible cultural diversity? I began this book with reference to the Reclaim Australia movement, which, as John Safran (2015) suggested, was strangely multicultural in its anti-multiculturalism. For Safran, we have reached the limits of our analytical frameworks if we can only see Reclaim Australia as an extreme expression of a latent white Australian nationalism. ‘Our right-wing parties ARE multicultural,’ he insists, ‘and I think it’s useful to swallow the medicine and acknowledge that that’s how it is, instead of having this facile analysis that it’s just white people [versus] brown people. It’s messier than that’ (in Dwyer, 2016). Reclaim Australia is a pertinent example because it is right wing and fundamentally united by an

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anti-Islam platform; it reminds us that the diversification of national imaginaries is not, in itself, an inherently emancipatory thing. But what it does bring our attention towards is that the battle lines we are accustomed to drawing are shifting, and in some surprising ways. The question herein is what role may postcolonial theory play in analysing these cultural shifts. How, where and, indeed, can a postcolonial lens be helpful and to what extent might that lens itself need readjusting? Perhaps, as is often suggested, postcolonialism has reached its analytical limits in terms of questions of identity and culture, which is one potential reason why many prominent postcolonial scholars are turning to environmental issues like climate change (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2012). But if the idea of the West is changing, it is still crucial to our social realities. Likewise, European colonialism set in play certain dynamics that, even as they mutate, continue to shape our present in a variety of ways. The position of postcolonial cultural critique in the world that appears to be unfolding before our eyes is not for me to say. But it seems to me that the nation has not just re-emerged as a negative force, but also a potentially powerful site of social struggle – particularly when it comes to agitating for the importance of cultural diversity and the right of minorities to express and articulate their differences, no matter how uncomfortable or confronting they may be. The challenge before us, Mahmoud Mamdani (in Chrisman, 2004: 184) argues, is to radically reinvent the nation-state to serve the needs of its own population. Right now this process of reinventing would seem to be hijacked by the far right, but, it is worth reminding ourselves, not exclusively so. Postcolonial citizenship points us towards the messiness and complexities of national community and the value of nation as a site of claims making and democratic struggle. In trying to reconcile the goal of national liberation with the aspirations of socialism, Franz Fanon (1965: 247–8) submitted that ‘it is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows’. I hope that my conceptualisation of postcolonial citizenship may encourage us to apply this intuition to our particular historical circumstances.

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Index

Abdel-Fattah, Randa 2, 109 Aboriginal recognition: Aboriginality 142–5, 148, 150, 154, 163n6; apology to Stolen Generations 154–62, 163n13; as populations and peoples 141–6; and sense of belonging 159; sovereignty 160–2; treaty 162, 164n17; see also Australian reconciliation process Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders see Indigenous Australians Acropolis Now (television comedy) 119–20, 121, 126 actional politics 70 affirmative remedies 58–9, 71 Alternative für Deutschland 3 Althusser, Louis 63 Aly, Anne 2 Aly, Waleed 130 American national identity 37 Ang, Ien 90–2, 94–5 Anglo-Celts: Australians as 38 anti-Asian sentiment 113–14 anti-colonial struggles 60, 66, 69 anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia 107–8, 112 Antifa 2 apologies: structure of 156–7 Asian immigration 113–14 assimilation: immigrants 38, 39; neoassimilationist projects 151; reconciliation and 150–1; self-determination and 160 Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill (2015) 131 Australian citizenship test 107–8, 109 Australian multiculturalism 12–13, 22, 38–41, 108, 169, 176

Australian Muslim community: diversity 108; misrecognition 108–9; popular culture and struggle for recognition 109–10; socioeconomic inequality 113; vilification and harassment 107–8, 112–13 Australian national identity 109; development 36, 37; History Wars and 148–9; multiculturalism and 39–41; and popular culture 119 Australian reconciliation process: and Aboriginal recognition 146–50; aim 147; critiques of 149–51; failure or 149, 160; and ideology/politics distinction 151–3; as last phase in colonial project 150–1; national framing of 147–9; ‘symbolic’ versus ‘practical’ 149 Australian values 108 authenticity: cultural authenticity 59; ideal of 56, 59, 73n5 banal nationalism 25 Barnes, Jimmy 2 Bhabha, Homi 30, 31, 33–4, 61–2, 71–2 big-N nationalisms 3, 4, 30 Bolt, Andrew 163n6 Brennan, Timothy 30 Bringing Them Home (report) 154, 161 British settler colonialism 36, 140 Bush, George W. 34 Butler, Judith 78–9, 82–6 Cabral, Amil 31 Calhoun, Craig 14, 21, 23–4, 26, 27–8, 35 Cameron, David 170 Carland, Susan 121 Carr, Bob 113 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 81–2

184

Index

Chrisman, Laura 30 citizenship: Australian citizenship 107–8, 109; see also multicultural citizenship; postcolonial citizenship clash of civilisations 131 colonialism: British settler colonialism 36, 140 comedy 120, 126; Acropolis Now 119–20, 121, 126; expectation of ethnic comedians 128, 129; Fear of a Brown Planet 110, 120, 125–9; Legally Brown 126, 129–30; Salam Café 110, 120–5, 130; stand-up comedy 126; Wogs Out of Work 126 Costello, Peter 107–8, 108 Coulthard, Glen 64–5, 138 critical regionalism 34 Cronulla Riots 1, 107, 109, 132n6 cultura nullius 38 cultural authenticity 59 cultural capital 96 cultural difference: regimes of representation 111 cultural diversity: framed by colonialism 33 cultural essentialism 61–2, 74n14, 88–9 cultural hybridity 61 cultural incommensurability 91 cultural justice: sexual justice and 89, 92 cultural relativism 88 cultural translation 85, 95, 102n6 culture: concept of 73n6; nationalism and 25; postcolonial approach to 11, 61–2; relational nature of 61; women and 89, 102–3n13 ‘culture card’ 89, 102–3n13 culture traitors 102n12 democracy: nationalism and 27–8 difference: feminist turn to 88, 90; institutionalisation of 88–9; politics of 5, 9, 47, 56–7; regimes of representation 111 domestication (management of difference) 115–16, 124 Drew, Peter 2 Dutton, Peter 130–1 Enlightenment thought 37, 80, 81, 82, 86, 101–2n1 equal respect, politics of 56–7 essentialism 61–2 ethnic comedians: expectations of 128, 129 ethnicity: nation and 23, 24, 42n3; nationalism and 25

European colonialism 8–9, 11, 61, 65, 178, 180 European nationalisms 36 Fanon, Frantz 31, 49–50, 63–4, 66–71, 73–4n13, 99 Fear of a Brown Planet (comedy show) 110, 120, 125–9 feminism: approaches to difference 90–5; critiques of multiculturalism 102–3n13; focus 86; inclusive feminist politics 90, 92–3; politics of partiality 90–2, 94; postcolonial feminist critique 87–9; recognition politics and 79–80; second-wave feminism 86, 102n8; third-wave feminism 86, 102n9; turn to difference 88, 90; see also postcolonial feminism Fox, Jon 26 Fraser, Nancy 55, 57–60 freedom: authenticity and 56 Gilroy, Paul 34–5 globalisation: nationalism and 30–4 Gorki Theatre (Berlin) 176–7 governmental belonging 96–7 Gramsci, Antonio 83 Hage, Ghassan 69–71, 80–1, 96–100 Hanson, Pauline 1, 114 Hassan, Ahmad 121–2 Hegel, G.W.F. 47, 51–3, 64, 83 hegemony 83, 95–6 Herder, Gottfried 56 ‘History Wars’ 148–9 Honneth, Axel 53, 54–5, 65–6, 78 Howard, John 40, 113, 148, 149, 151, 154, 163n11 humanism 67, 69, 70, 79 Hussain, Nazeem 120, 125–30 hybridity 22, 61 identity: Aboriginal identity 142–5, 148, 150, 154, 163n6; distributive injustice and 57–8; political identity 6, 15, 49, 71, 95; selfhood and recognition 50–1; see also Australian national identity identity model of recognition 57 identity politics 5, 62, 177 Imam, Ahmed 123–4 immigration policy: Australia 37–9 Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (Cwlth) 37–8 Indigenous affairs policy 160

Index

185

Laclau, Ernesto 82 Lazarus, Neil 30 legal recognition 52, 54–5 Legally Brown (television comedy series) 126, 129–30 Les Indigènes de la République 176–7 little-n nationalisms 3, 4, 30 love 53

Modood, Tariq 175 Mohanty, C.T. 90, 92, 93 moral panics 113 multicultural citizenship 11, 170–1; concept of 172–3; criticisms of 173, 175; postcolonial citizenship as supplement 172–7; top-down verus bottom-up accounts 176 multicultural nationalism 97–8 multicultural politics of recognition 4–8, 171, 179 multicultural recognition struggles 95–100 multiculturalism: Australian policy 12–13, 22, 38–41, 169; ‘death’ of 170; in Europe 169–70; ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ 40; interculturalist challenge to 173–4; liberal feminist critiques 102–3n13; mushy multiculturalism 108; popular culture and 119–20; postcolonial critique of 9–10; and social integration 170 Muslim difference: combative difference 125–9; normalising 121–5; securitisation and domestication 114–15 Muslim misrecognition: between transnational and national 110–16; see also Australian Muslim community mutual recognition 52–5, 64

Mabo judgement 144–5 master-slave relation 52, 64, 72–3n1 materialism: approach to nation/ nationalism 22, 30–1, 32–3 Mead, George Herbert 53 Merkel, Angela 170 migrants: conditionality imposed on 115; second-generation migrants 100, 108, 128 Migration Act 1958 (Cwlth) 38 Miller-Idriss, Cynthia 26 minority struggles for recognition: anti-nationalist view of 33–4; interculturality and 62, 72; nationalist discourse and 5–8 mis-interpellation 98, 99–101 misrecognition: and conceptions of nation 110–11; denial of equal human dignity 50; of indigenous and colonised peoples 60–1; Muslims 110–16; psycho-affective experience of 54, 67–9; recognition and redistribution 57–9; as source of conflict 15, 49, 55, 66, 174; and struggles for recognition 6–7, 54

Nalliah, Danny 40 Narayan, U. 93–4 nation: continuity and change in ideas of 29; definition 22–3, 24; as discursive formation 21; dual character of 20–2; ethnicity and 23, 24, 42n3; as hegemonic field of power 96; and ideal national 96; as imagined political community 3, 21–3, 22, 42n1; nationalism and 22–8; postcolonial critique 20; potential for democratic politics 27–8, 180; role in contemporary postcolonial politics 172, 177–80; as site of contestation and competing claims 3–4, 35, 180; as a universal 80 national belonging 6–7, 96, 110 national capital 96–7, 98 national field 96–7 nationalism: banal nationalism 25; big-N nationalisms 3, 4, 30; definition 23–4; as discursive formation 25–7; dual character of 21; globalisation and 3–4; imperialist vs anti-imperialist nationalisms 31–3; little-n nationalisms 3, 30;

Indigenous Australians: cultural groups and terminology 162–3n1; disadvantage 143, 149, 163n3; dispossession 140–1; multiculturalism and 41, 43n11; Northern Territory intervention 160; politicisation of identity 142–5, 148, 150, 154, 163n6; population 163n4; sovereignty 160–2; Stolen Generations 154, 155–6, 161; see also Aboriginal recognition; Australian reconciliation process Indigenous peoples: as political constituency 139, 163n2 interculturalism 62, 72, 173 interpellation 63 Islamic State 130 Islamic terrorism 108, 111 Keating Labor government 154 Keating, Paul 146, 148, 149, 152

186

Index

multicultural nationalism 87–8; nation and 22–8; as normative claim 27–8; persistence of 11; populist nationalisms 179–80; postcolonial theory and 28–36 nationhood: denial of 42n2 negative interpellation 99 négritude 70, 73–4n13 Nelson, Brendan 163–4n16 neo-imperialism 33 non-recognition 54, 60 Northern Territory intervention 160 Orientalism 111, 112 Parekh, Bhikhu 175 Parry, Benita 30 partiality, politics of 90–2, 94 participatory parity 58–9, 64–5 particularity: relationship with universality 78, 82, 84–6 PEGIDA (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) 111 political identity 6, 15, 49, 71, 95 politics of difference 5, 9, 47, 56–7 politics of equal respect 56–7 politics of identity 5, 63, 177 politics of recognition: culture in 59, 61–2; equation with identity politics 57–8; pitfalls for Indigenous peoples 138–9; postcolonial critique 48–50, 60–6; see also multicultural politics of recognition popular culture: definition 117; nation and national identity 109, 118–20; politics of 116–18; as site of interpellation 118 populist nationalisms 179–80 postcolonial citizenship: as analytical framework 13–14, 170–1; between integration and separation 8–12; and postcolonialism 171–2, 177–80; as supplement to multicultural citizenship 172–7 postcolonial feminism: critique of hegemonic feminism 87–9; and struggle for recognition 79–80, 89–95 postcolonialism: critique of recognition theory 48–9, 60–6; definition 8–9; divergent strands 30, 43n6; materialist approach 22, 30–1, 32–3; multiculturalism and 9–11; nationalism and 28–36; ‘post’ and ‘post-’, meanings of

29; and postcolonial citizenship 171–2, 177–80; poststructural approach 20, 22, 30, 31 poststructuralism: approach to nation/ nationalism 20, 22, 30, 31–2 practical nationality 96–7 procedural liberalism 55–7, 73n3 psuedo-universalism 94 Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cwlth) 160, 163n6 racism: as racial process of interpellation 99; sexism and 89 racial vilification: of Australian Muslims 107–8, 112–13 Rahman, Aamer 125–9 reciprocal recognition 53–4, 63, 66, 73n4 Reclaim Australia 1–3, 40, 111, 179–80 recognition: definition 51; identity model 57–8; as ideology 60–6; importance to Indigenous peoples 137; key debates 55–60; paradigm 5–6, 47–8, 55; as political remedy 50, 55, 66, 71, 174; politics and difference 53–60; and redistribution 57–8; selfhood and identity 50–3 recognition politics see politics of recognition reconciliation: ideology/politics distinction 151–3; and recognition 146–50 redistribution: recognition and 57–9 Renan, Ernest 24, 32 resistance/co-option dichotomy 140 revolutionary violence 66, 69 Rise Up Australia 40 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 146, 163n7 Rudd, Kevin 155–6, 163n12 Said, Edward 30, 31, 32, 43n6 Salam Café (television programme) 110, 120–5, 130 Sartre, Jean Paul 63, 73–4n13 SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) 119 Schaap: A. 151–3 second-generation migrants 100, 108, 128 second-wave feminism 86, 102n8 securitisation 115, 116 self-consciousness: development of 51–2 self-determination: right of peoples to 31 self-esteem 53, 57 selfhood: recognition and identity 50–3 settler colonies 36–7

Index settler national identities: development of 36–7 sexism: racism and 98 sexual justice: and cultural justice 89, 92 social esteem 53, 54 Socialist Alliance 2 society: nation and 23 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: critical regionalism 34; ‘global’ feminism 92–3; on multiculturalism 177; on nation/ nationalism 31, 32; status as postcolonial scholar 30, 43n6; strategic essentialism 62, 73n8 stand-up comedy 126 state, the: nation and 23 strategic essentialism 62, 73n8, 74n14 substantive citizenship 172 Tampa incident 113 Taylor, Charles 47, 55–7, 59, 71–2, 73n3 terra nullius 38, 144, 161 terrorism: Islamic terrorism 108, 111 ‘Third World Woman’ 87–8 Third Worldism 17n6 third-wave feminism 86, 102n9 transformative remedies 58–9, 71 Treaty of Westphalia 36 Trump, Donald 3

187

UKIP 3 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 163n2 United Patriots Front 1 universalism: competing universalisms 85–6, 89–95; contentiousness of 81–2; psuedo-universalism 94 universality: ‘dead’ versus ‘living’ 82–6; relationship with particularity 78, 82, 84–6; as site of hegemonic contestation 78–9, 83–4 violent anti-colonial struggle 66, 69 Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance 2 ‘waves of immigration’ thesis 114, 124 Welcome to Australia 2 West/Islam divide 111 Western imperialism 8–9, 17n6 White Australia policy 37–8, 39, 109 white national dominance 97–8 Wik decision 144, 163n5 Wogs Out of Work 126 women: culture and 89, 102–3n13; human rights 85 Žižek, Slavoj 82