Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

• The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia – Ghassan Hage (Sweatshop) The publication of The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement represents a significant collaboration.
• Hage is an Australian Arab immigrant, whose forebears came to Australia in the 1930s and settled in Lithgow, where they established a clothing factory.
• Sweatshop is an urban political project created in western Sydney by a younger generation of Australians from Arab and other immigrant and refugee backgrounds.
• While the republished works were mainly written early in the second generation, their continuing relevance is both salutary and disturbing.

What is a White person?

• For Hage, it is a self-referential category into which White people put themselves.
• That is, people who think of themselves as White are White people.
• Nor is it racial, in the older sense of race as a bio-social category, with shared DNA clusters associated with territories of origin.
• Rather, it is a “fantasy position” born out of colonial history, one that is essentially European.
• It is imagined to be rooted in the stories of north-western Europe: stories of empires won and an Enlightenment project sustained.

White Nation

• In White Nation, Hage draws on two methods: one provided by his studies with Pierre Bourdieu in Paris, and another developed in the social anthropological space of ethnography and listening.
• White people, suggests one letter, are more immediately seen as Australian (part of the dominant cultural group), even when they have only recently arrived.
• As Hage notes, White multiculturalism evades any commitment that “we are a multicultural community in all our diversity”.
• Moreover, argues Hage, these views, be they for or against multiculturalism, all stand upon an edifice that assumes White superiority – and fantasises Australia as a place in which White superiority “should reign supreme”.

The politics of White decline

• In the decades since White Nation first appeared, the politics of White decline have become an increasingly mainstream concern.
• This narrative played a key part in the anti-vaxx movement, despite the multicultural makeup of that movement.
• Both played a role in White Nation – but they foreground Against Paranoid Nationalism.

Worrying and caring

• In Against Paranoid Nationalism, Hage proposes that two opposing stances – worrying and caring – establish the parameters of the narcissism and paranoia engulfing Australia.
• Worrying about the nation’s present and future breeds an intense fear and hatred of outsiders who might threaten the interests of those who claim a unique right to worry.
• In the process, people become less willing to hope for a more caring future.
• We are all the better off for Hage’s eclectic, systematic, imaginative and penetrating assessment of the human condition in this time of late imperialism.