Guilt and migrant experience in Australia: narratives of happiness and hatred

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the role that guilt plays in Australia’s construction of its outsiders by focusing on contemporary migrant experience. I build upon Sarah Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion to read migrant interviews in relation to media: films, political speeches, and other discursive structures that facilitate social organization in Australia. In the first part of this paper, I argue that a ‘multicultural narrative’ positions the nation as a ‘happy home,’ and examine how this can displace feelings of guilt in the migrant by rendering possible social transgressions positive steps towards attaining a greater social good. In the second section of this paper, I discuss Australia’s ‘hatred narratives.’ I do not define hatred as a necessarily aggressive emotion, but instead, demonstrate the way particular words can be affectively charged because of the histories they invoke, and show how this affect can be mobilized to create outsiders who are not welcome in the national imaginary and Australian society. These narratives however, are not fixed: political parties can appeal to tropes that have accumulated in affective value – such as the ‘home’ – in order to achieve different political goals, and to organize social groups by aligning individuals with or against affectively charged objects.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• migration
• politics
• Australia
• guilt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Names of interviewees have been changed and identifying information removed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Brami

Thomas Brami is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His current research focuses on landscape and Australian film.