Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia

This book examines the experience of race and ethnicity in Australia after the withering away of official multiculturalism. The first chapter looks at the formation of the Australian state, the role that multiculturalism has played, and the impact of neoliberal ideas. The second chapter takes nightclubbing in the city of Perth during the 1980s, the peak period for official multiculturalism, to exemplify how diversity and exclusion functioned in everyday life. The third chapter considers the imbrication of Christianity in the Australian socio-cultural order and its impact on the limits of multiculturalism with particular concentration on Islam and the Australian Muslim experience. Subsequent chapters discuss the exclusionary experience of various groups identified as non-white through the lens of films, popular music and television programs.

Examines how multiculturalism functions in the 21st century by considering a number of different texts Discusses how the ideology of official multiculturalism has declined and how everyday multiculturalism functions in the context of a history that has privileged Christianity and whiteness Offers a new perspective on Australian culture in the present day

Autorentext

Jon Stratton is an adjunct professor at the University of South Australia. He is attached to the UniSA Creative unit. Jon has published widely in Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Popular Music Studies, Jewish Studies, and on race and multiculturalism. Jon's most recent book related to the present topic is Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia (2011).

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Logics of Exclusion.- 2. Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene of the 1980s.- 3. With God on our Side: The Unholy Mixture of Religion and Race, Christianity and Whiteness, Islam and Otherness, in the Australian Experience.- 4. The Sapphires were not the Australian Supremes: Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires. - 5. Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement and Identity in 'My Island Home'.- 6. The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits of Whiteness in Australia.- 7. Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come the Habibs! , Race, Identity, and Representation.- 8. Pizza and Housos : Neoliberalism, the Discursive Construction of the Underclass, and its Representation.- 9. Afterword: and then novel coronavirus happened