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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Everyday Multiculturalism
• Muslim and Arab Australians
• Everyday Racism
• Public Space
• Post-9/11 City
• Mobility
• National Belonging
• Social Inclusion
• Cultural Citizenship

Notes

1. ‘Leb’ is a colloquial and often derogatory term for Lebanese in Australia. The white vigilante mob in the 2005 Cronulla riots chanted, ‘Fuck off Lebs!’ (Poynting 2006).

2. ‘Revert’ is a term used by Muslims in English to refer to those coming from other faiths, or no religion, who adopt Islam.

3. For an insightful analysis of the dynamics involved, with performances of sexism on the one side interacting with racism on the other, see Lattas (2009). Lattas (2009, p. 150) asserts that these have been “discounted by the pedagogical left”, but herself rather discounts the ethnocentrism in the reports that the immigrant young men are peculiarly patriarchal compared to white ‘Aussie’ male beach culture, and overlooks the victimisation of Muslim women, with its intersection of racism and sexism.

4. Perera's (2006, 2007) analyses, for example, are powerful rhetorically, but are largely based on analyses of media reportage and have little to say in terms of the lived experiences of Australians: the focus of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greg Noble

Greg Noble is Associate Professor at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney

Scott Poynting

Scott Poynting is Professor in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University