Racialised Self-Marketisation: The Importance of Accounting for Neoliberal Rationality Within Manifestations of Internalised Racism

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of neoliberal rationality within manifestations of internalised racism. In doing so, it combines research on internalised racial oppression, race-relations in the contemporary Australian zeitgeist, and work on neoliberal subjectivities. Drawing on these, the article explains how internalising a contaminated notion of the universal subject is an important dynamic to consider within the phenomenon of internalised racism. This leads to examining how globalised hegemonic racialised ideology in the form of white colonial supremacy interacts with a growing economic rationalism, rendering racialised subjects to think of and conduct themselves as one would a business. It is in the navigating of these racialised neoliberal social spaces that fosters the drive for ‘self-marketisation’, leading to the interplay of two connected dynamics for the racialised: the accumulation of whiteness-as-capital, and the subsequent ostentatious display of one's accumulated whiteness. Overall, the article argues for the importance of accounting for neoliberal rationality as a lens for viewing manifestations of internalised racism in the Australian context.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• racialisation
• internalised racism
• neoliberal subject
• colonialism
• neoliberal rationality

Acknowledgements

The author received no funding for this article. The author would like to thank Ms. Hannah Garden of Deakin University for taking the time to read an early draft and provide feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Adam Z. Seet is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne. His current research involves investigating how Internalised Racism manifests within Asian Australian individuals and communities. His work draws upon the scholarship on race, and postcolonial literature.

Notes

1. It should be noted, however, that studies examining what could be considered the impact of internalised racism on Australian Aboriginal communities through the phenomenon of lateral/ horizontal violence (i.e. Bulman and Hayes 2011), do exist to a much lesser extent. Additionally, I have found two studies that deal specifically with internalised racism and queer Asian Australian males (i.e. Ayres 1999; Leong 2002), which will be utilised latter. This lack in local scholarship is, in part, a rationale for this article.

2. Whilst certainly not an argument against ‘interracial’ relationships, research into the particular salience of AFWM couples is often sparked because of their tendency to occur at a much higher frequently than couplings between Asian males and white females, at least in the US (see for instance Weiss 1970, Feliciano et al. 2009, and more recently, Tsunokai et al. 2014). Additionally, the apparent contradiction with high profile white men in the Alt-Right and their apparent ‘fetish’ for Asian women (Lim 2018) also furthers interest in this racialised and gendered dynamic.

3. It is interesting to see a parallel between Fanon's Black Skins critique of Mayotte Capecia's Je suis Martiniquaise published in 1948, where the author confesses her desire to be married specifically to a white man (42), and Tan's Sarong Party Girls, published in 2016, of which the similar pursuit of Caucasian men is the central plot. Both also simultaneously denigrate their own racial/cultural heritage in prose, highlighting these examples as definitive of manifestations of internalised racism, which in this case seem to be connected to dynamics of European colonialism.