Central African Refugee Women Resettled in Australia: Colonial Legacies and the Civilising Process

ABSTRACT

This article explores how experiences of racialisation toward women who are resettled in Australia from Central African countries of Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo reflect a colonial imaginary and a legacy of postcolonising dominance in Australia. Drawing on 18-months of ethnographic research, I describe how assumptions of difference, dirtiness, and savagery become attached to women resettled in Australia from Central Africa by the persons they encounter within their everyday lives. Although resettled refugees are provided with civic inclusion in the nation as permanent residents, such experiences of marginalisation in contexts of everyday life represent a form of mis-interpellation, in which their inclusion as residents does not equate to being treated with social worth. I argue that the resettlement of refugees in Australia is as much a civilising process as a process of providing resettled refugees with protection.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• refugee settlement
• forced migration
• racism
• everyday racism
• racialisation
• gendered racialisation
• whiteness
• Central African migrants
• postcolonialism
• resettlement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Dr Georgina Ramsay is a Sessional Academic in the School of Humanities and Social Science and Research Assistant at the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education, both at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research specialisations include: socio-cultural anthropology in relation to displacement, transnationalism, and motherhood; refugee and forced migration studies; and, more recently, equity and diversity in higher education.

Notes

1 ‘Central Africa’ here refers to the countries of Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The women who participated in the research for this article were born in one of these three countries. The choice to delineate the research population as based on this regional label reflects UNHCR (2015a) regional categorisations, but does not mean time imply that this regional label designates a culturally, socially, and politically homogenised group of people, as is emphasised in Phillips’ (2015) introduction to the Online Issue Research on Refugees and Asylum Seekers published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NSW Department of Education and Training (Australian Postgraduate Award).