Constructions of race: symbolic ethnic capital and the performance of youth identity in multicultural Australia

ABSTRACT

The relationship between ethnicity and cultural and social capital has been taken up by several scholars in terms of questions of disadvantage. This paper considers the performance of race and ethnicity as positive capital among a group of Sudanese young people with refugee backgrounds in Brisbane, Australia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate young people's adaptation of cultural associations in their hybridized and essentialized self-representations. In particular, I explore my informants’ use of hip hop music and style as resources in performance. Much of young people's engagement with capital in performance enables their relatively overt and self-conscious process of clarifying who they are in relationship to one another, often with particular reference to race and ethnicity. Their engagement with globally relevant mediums is indicative of young people's agency in defining their own lives in the context of the political and moral framework of Australian multiculturalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Capital
• ethnicity
• race
• youth
• multiculturalism
• Australia

Acknowledgements

I would like to express gratitude to the University of Queensland for intellectual and financial support during the research for this article. I would especially like to thank Dr Sally Babidge for years of invaluable support and guidance. Finally, I would like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking feedback and critique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Participants in this project also comprised broad networks of the key participants, including their siblings, schoolmates and other young people who attended various social gatherings and parties.

2. All personal names are pseudonyms.

3. This pseudonym is a nickname developed and used by the student's peers. It further reflects the engagement, among these young people, with American cultural symbols.

4. Arabic word spelled phonetically and translated according to informant's description.