After hybridity: Muslim-Australians and the imagined community

Abstract

What would I know about Muslim-Australians? Not very much, as it happens. This is something I have in common with many other members of the Anglo-Australian community. In what follows, I want to acknowledge at the outset, I am not drawing upon primary research into this sector of the Australian community in order to say something new about it. Rather, my examination reads aspects of the media representation of Muslim-Australians as symptomatic of a cultural-political shift I wish to understand and challenge. At its simplest, this choice of topic derives from a growing alarm at the unprecedented degree of public antagonism to Muslim-Australians as members of the national community. The locations of that antagonism include speeches in national and state parliamentary debates as well as talkback radio, news reporting on radio and television, and (most persistently and disturbingly) the opinion columns of the metropolitan and national newspapers. Specific instances I have in mind include the following: