Scott Poynting

The resistible rise of islamophobia : Anti-Muslim racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001

This article compares the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and Australia, from 1989 to 2001, as a foundation for assessing the extent to which the upsurge of Islamophobia after 11 September was a development of existing patterns of racism in these two countries. The respective histories of immigration and settlement by Muslim populations are outlined, along with the relevant immigration and ‘ethnic affairs’ policies and the resulting demographics. The article traces the ideologies of xenophobia that developed in Britain and Australia over this period. It records a transition from anti-Asian and anti-Arab racism to anti-Muslim racism, reflected in and responding to changes in the identities and cultural politics of the minority communities. It outlines instances of the racial and ethnic targeting by the state of the ethnic and religious minorities concerned, and postulates a causal relationship between this and the shifting patterns of acts of racial hatred, vilification and discrimination.

What caused the Cronulla riot

The outbreak of mass racist violence against young men of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ on Cronulla beach, Sydney, in December 2005 was the culmination of a campaign of populist incitement waged in the media and by the state. The battle to reclaim control of the beach for white Australia mirrored, it is suggested here, the battle that the Howard government has waged to reclaim control of the nation itself from asylum seekers and the Muslim/Middle Eastern ‘enemy’.

“Tolerance, Freedom, Justice and Peace”?: Britain, Australia and Anti-Muslim Racism since 11 September 2001

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive “othering” in “Western” countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their “war on terror”. This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as “evil” and a “fifth column” enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the States anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases.

Introduction - Negotiating belonging: Migration and generations

‘‘Belonging’’ may well be one of the ‘‘softer’’ social science concepts but it is central to any discussion of some of the hardest issues facing human societies today: immigrant integration and cultural diversity. The question of belonging has the capacity to mobilise individuals, communities and nations, emotionally and politically particularly around the contentious question of citizenship rights and the management of ethnic and religious diversity in pluralist Western democracies. Yet, despite its contemporary relevance and importance and the associated increase in academic interest (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst; Moran; Yuval-Davis, Kannabiran, Vieten and Hage), the concept of belonging is relatively ill defined. It is generally agreed that belonging is not a static phenomenon but rather a set of processes that are central to the way in which human relationships are conducted. Individuals and groups are caught up in a continuing and dynamic dialectic of seeking

White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Social Spaces

This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusion from local as well as nationally significant public spaces. While access to public space and freedom to move are conventionally seen as fundamental to a democratic state, these are often seen in abstract terms. This article emphasises how movement in public space is a very concrete dimension of our experience of freedom, in showing how incivilities directed against Arab and Muslim Australians have operated pedagogically as a spatialised regulation of national belonging. The article concludes by examining how processes associated with the Cronulla riots of December 2005 have retarded the capacities of Muslim and Arab Australians to negotiate within and across spaces, diminishing their opportunities to invest in local and national spaces, shrinking their resources and opportunities for place-making in public space.

Snakes and leaders: hegemonic masculinity in ruling-class boys' boarding schools

Recent events in a ruling-class boys’ boarding school college in Sydney prompted public discussion about “bullying.” Debate ranged between those seeing an endemic problemto be cured and those who saw minor, unfortunate, and atypical incidents in a system where bullying is under control. It is argued here that such practice is inherent in ruling-class boys’ education. It is an important part of making ruling-class men. Using life-history methods with available biographical material, the article shows thatruling-class schooling of boys in boarding schools involves “sending away” and initial loneliness, bonding in groups demanding allegiance, attachment to tradition, subjection to hierarchy and progress upward through it, group ridiculing and punishment of sensitiveness and close relationships, severe sanctions against difference, brutal bodily discipline, and inculcating competitive individualism. Brutalization and “hardening” are essential to all these processes and are characteristic of ruling-class masculinity.

Grafting Cultures: Longing and Belonging in Immigrants’ Gardens and Backyards in Fairfield

This paper explores migration stories and examines the ways migrants use their gardens as sites of cultural practice in the Fairfield municipality of Western Sydney, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We argue that many of those from diverse cultural backgrounds use their gardens in ways very different from the stereotypical conceptions of Australian suburbia. Far from being idyllic places of retreat and repose separate from the world of work, our research reveals that many migrant gardens are places in which creative labour is expended to symbolise connections not only to homeland but also to Australia and to other cultures. We concentrate in this paper on two general patterns of backyard activity. The first is intensively horticultural, involving creating a backyard smallholding for growing produce traditional to the homeland. Secondly those, mainly from urban or middle-class backgrounds, who transform their backyards into exhibition spaces, outlets for their creative impulses as artists and amateur curators.

Middle Eastern appearances : 'ethnic gangs', moral panic and media framing

This article details a moral panic in 1998–2000 about “ethnic gangs” in Sydneys south-western suburbs and analyses its ideological construction of the links between ethnicity, youth and crime. It documents the racisms of labelling and targeting of immigrant young people which misread, oversimplify and misrepresent complex and class-related social realities as racial, and the common-sense1 sharing of these understandings, representations and practices by “mainstream” media, police and vocal representatives in state, local and “ethnic” politics. The data used in this analysis are largely comprised of English-language media extracts, press, radio, television — both commercial and government-funded; and national, state and local in circulation, supplemented by interview material, from an ethnographic pilot study, with Lebanese-Australian youth, Lebanese immigrant parents, ethnic community workers, community leaders and police.

‘Intersections’ of Masculinity and Ethnicity: a study of male Lebanese immigrant youth in western Sydney

Abstract This article reports on an ethnographic study of teenage male secondary school students of Arabic‐speaking background in a working‐class suburb of Sydney. Interviews with friendship groups of migrant young men explored their identity formation in terms of ethnicity and masculinity. Their ‘intersections’ of masculinity and ethnicity, along with class relations, exhibit ‘contradictory consciousness’ characteristic of the ‘common sense’ of the socially subordinated. Forms of ideological ‘inversion’ provide ideational ‘resolutions’, in various contexts, of contradictions experienced in the lives of the youths. They deploy forms of ‘protest masculinity’ against injuries of racism, at school and in public spaces. The article examines the relationships of the young men with other groups of male teenagers, as well as with parents and teachers, showing how their masculinities are constructed within social relations of ethnicity and the experience of racism, and conversely how their ethnic identities are p...

The rise and falter of the field of ethnic politics in Australia : the case of Lebanese community leadership

Since the advent of multiculturalism in Australia in the 1970s, ‘ethnicity’ has acquired not only cultural and social importance, but significant political consequences as groups mobilised around ‘ethnic communities’ and as the State increasingly structured social policy around cultural differences. The political patronage and funding central to Australian multiculturalism led to the development of organisations and leaders whose task was not only to service the needs of specific ‘ethnic communities’ but to represent them in the wider political field. This paper traces the emergence in Australia of the field of ethnic politics, in the Bourdieusian sense. Using the Lebanese ‘ethnic community’ as a case study, we analyse the accumulation by ‘community leaders’ of ‘ethnic capital’, which converts to symbolic capital that is recognised by the State as the capacity of leaders to represent ethnic communities. We argue that conflicts arising over moral panics around ‘Lebanese youth gangs’ in Sydney since 1998 have undermined the legitimacy of Lebanese community leadership. This has coincided with moves by the NSW government to devalorise ‘ethnicity’ and substitute it with ‘communal relations’, which accord with the national shift away from multiculturalism under the Howard government, as the politics of ‘One Nation’ are increasingly mainstreamed.