Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies
4:1 (2006), 15-30
Australian-Chilean / Chilean-Australian… Where to
Host the Hyphen? A Post-National Reading of Identity
for the Travelling Subject
Philippa COLLIN University of Sydney, Australia ’In Australia people ask me where I’m from. When I go back to Chile, they ask me where I’ve been. Its funny because when I’m here [Australia] I’m proving myself Australian and when I’m there I’m proving myself Chilean’.1 THIS PAPER raises questions about the development of identity as it is experienced by migrant subjects in a world increasingly characterised by globalization. I question the tenability of the concept of national identity in an increasingly transient world where the flow of human movement, the impact of technology and the economic, cultural and political relationships between states and their expatriate communities have changed the way we position ourselves in the world. I offer some provisional ways of critiquing national identity and in employing theoretical frameworks from migration theory, diaspora and transnational studies, critically engage with the ways in which Australian identity is discussed in relation to, and by, migrants. I focus on the responses of some Chilean‐Australians to issues of national identity and discourses on the state, immigration, refugees and border protection. Fieldwork conducted in 2002 produced data from in‐depth interviews, documentary evidence and the Spanish‐language print media. In August 2001 the Norwegian tanker, the Tampa took on board 438 (mostly Afghan) refugees from a wooden vessel sinking inside Indonesian sea‐rescue zone and headed to the Australian territory of Christmas Island. A ten‐day stand off with the Australian government was resolved only when New Zealand and the pacific island of Nauru agreed to provide asylum for the boat people. In October 2001 the Australian Federal Government claimed that another boatload of asylum seekers, desperate to be allowed to land in Australia, had thrown their children overboard when approached (and fired at) by the HMAS Adelaide. These incidents (and others) generated significant public debate in the lead up to and following the 2001 Federal Election and formed the context of my fieldwork. I gathered the articles, editorials and letter responses from the Spanish language press and talked with Chilean‐Australians’ about issues of identity and issues of immigration, with particular reference to the debate on refugees. In critiquing national identity I acknowledge the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting research into migrant identities. This research was not conducted as an exercise in participant observation, but as an exchange between the researcher and research participants. Kevin McDonald has advocated this approach in his study of the relationship between experiences of self‐hood and new patterns of social life;2 he argues that investigating ‘experience’ creates an opportunity for communication between researcher and participants, making visible the ‘real stories’ Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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occurring at the centre of social – and cultural – transformation.3 In conducting field work, the research process was presented as an opportunity to enter into dialogue between subjects and subjectivities. In this way, the position of researcher is constantly shifting from within the ‘mainstream’ of Australian culture, to semi‐
membership in ‘the margins’ or that in‐between place identified by Homi Bhabha as the ‘third space’.4 This ‘third space’ becomes a meeting place of voluntary marginalisation from the socio‐political centre and it is within this theoretical space that the research takes place. Identity, Migration… Nation The concept of nation is a fragile and yet potent idea that operates along trajectories that are both unifying and dividing, that are productive and destructive. Nationalist projects have a profound impact on people in the so‐called postcolonial era and the processes of global capitalism have produced the conditions in which ‘travel’ to and between ‘localities’ has changed the way that nation and identity are experienced. The impact of technology, the economic, cultural and political relationships between states and their expatriate communities and the ease of movement between countries (which only some groups enjoy) have changed the way we position ourselves in the world. Individuals and groups may simultaneously imagine themselves as residents of a global village, as members of communities who may have no physical sited‐ness or as independent stakeholders in several different communities whose physical locations and perceived characteristics are distinct and perhaps mutually exclusive. Yet, at the same time as we are witnessing a period in which there is apparently greater freedom of movement, we see an international hysteria around border control emerging, particularly in the European Union, United States of America and Australia. Refugees and so‐called illegal migrants have created a debate on who should be able to enter and exit countries and how. This is despite the fact that globally there were more than five million fewer refugees in 2004 than in 19915. Nevertheless, state control of borders in the ‘minority’ world or the ‘North’ are becoming more stringent, whilst there appears to be a simultaneous fragmenting of the ‘national’, as people, images, objects and ideas travel to and from different parts of the globe with varying degrees of regulation. (For instance, the movement of people is highly regulated in some areas whilst the transfer of products, images and information is hardly regulated at all). This seemingly arbitrary regulation of physical space stands in stark contrast to the conceptual spaces that exist largely independent of control or regulation. However, in the context of these ‘global’ conditions, challenges to the concept of national identity are felt unequally across different groups. For instance, the challenges that have been made to the status of the ‘nation’ by technology do not necessarily affect all people equally. For example, Australian Aboriginal peoples may be more concerned about the continuing erosion of their cultural heritage as a result of the persistent forces of neo‐colonialism than they are about North American cultural imperialism.6 By the same token, immigrants may find that the pressures to assimilate in their host country can be subverted through the forging of online communities that exist outside the realm of the state. The experience of competing cultural, political and structural discourses forms the terrain through which 16
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individuals navigate identity. Arjun Appadurai has argued that in order to fully comprehend the way in which humans organise, express themselves and develop in societies, we should now ‘think ourselves beyond the nation’.7 The concept of the nation operates on several key levels. In general, the notion of a community defined by ‘ethnicity’ is considered essential because it symbolizes the common myths, rituals, values, objectives and traditions that unify individuals and groups. This ethnicity is then sited and bound in a physical location from which it may articulate its national identity in comparison with foreign nationalisms. This is what Appadurai refers to as the ‘production of locality’.8 The projection of ‘locality’ into non‐sited spaces, particularly by technology but also by travel (enabling subjects to ‘imagine themselves’ outside the state, but inside the nation’) produces interesting challenges to nationalism. Non‐sited localities traverse space by way of technological advances and in the portable imaginations of migrants. These new localities have created a crisis for the modern state and have rendered the concept of the nation most problematic. More importantly they have opened up real possibilities for the conceptual tool of the transnational identity to challenge traditional nation‐state official discourses ‐ such as multiculturalism. The doctrine of multiculturalism has been heavily criticised in Australia by ‘ethnic communities’ who feel they have been commoditised and turned into a spectacle, whilst the inherited British culture has been naturalized as the core culture of Australian society.9 Multiculturalism has been largely rejected by the Howard Government’s anti‐political correctness stance in an effort to ‘prevent the nation from fragmenting’, on the grounds that multiculturalism focuses on the things that divide us, rather than those that unite us.10 Though the policy of multiculturalism has contributed to the perception of Australian society as a pluralistic and largely ‘tolerant’ society the shortfalls of the policy have been criticized most notably because, in the words of Jon Stratton, ‘official multiculturalism is formulated around stable – that is fixed and unchanging – national cultures’.11 As consumable ‘spectacles’ ethnic communities are therefore stripped of claims to agency and operate in a core‐periphery relationship with the ‘White Anglo‐Celtic’ tradition.12 This perspective is illuminating, but fails to account for transnational influences and the referential processes that engage subjects with both the notion of ‘home’ and ‘host’ (including British Australians). I therefore propose two preliminary points of departure for the study of immigrant responses to the notion of national identity. Firstly, immigrant identities are framed by the postcolonial conditions that have propelled their migration. Therefore, personal and collective experiences and reasons for immigrating are profoundly implicated in the development of a sense of cultural identity, and these experiences are framed by the structural political, economic and social conditions of migration. This assumption builds on the arguments forwarded by Appadurai13, Bhabha14 and Hall15 in relation to diaspora and identity. Secondly, these identities are constantly engaged with and implicated in the struggle by the dominant national identity to retain control of the national imagination16. Culture, identity and space What is meant when we evoke the notion of ‘culture’ in discussing national—or postnational—identities? Some argue for the re‐conceptualisation of culture in terms Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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of fluidity, encounter and disruption in a multidimensional and multidirectional flow across space and time. This is a flow, suggest Gupta and Ferguson, which not only traverses the postcolonial boundaries of modern nation‐states, but that exists within the formal borders of these states. These borders are then blurred and transgressed, as geographical limits or conventions, from ‘within’ by margin dwellers; at the same time, they are challenged by individuals or groups who reside outside the state borders of their ‘nation’ as exiles, emigrants and refugees.17 In her discussion on transnational identities in England, Prina Webner points out that a popular, and misguided, assumption amongst cultural studies theorists is that culture is always sited.18 Therefore, the negotiation of cultural identities, particularly for those transnational beings that are diasporic or cosmopolitan, is the negotiation of different ‘sites’. For, in the imagination of the transnational subject, there cannot be a single, solitary and stagnant cultural site. Appadurai discusses the transnational nature of identity in relation to five ‘scapes’ across which identity is shaped. These are ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes and they serve to draw our attention to the ‘…fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles’.19 He proposes these ‘scapes’ are the ‘building blocks’ of imagined worlds – arguing that the imagined communities of Benedict Anderson, should be understood as ‘…the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe’20. The global potentiality for identity is thus recognised in the movement of people, images, technology, finance and ideas and is manifest in different forms of identity that go beyond the national. For instance, one key observation that can be made in light of the interviews considered in this paper is that the ‘community’ is the first site of identification in the development of participants’ sense of Australian identity. However, to borrow the theoretical framework of Appadurai, this community is articulated across various ‘scapes’. Chilean‐Australians are able to imagine themselves as both Australian and Chilean through their emphasis on the concept of community – recognised in specific geographical locations as well as non‐
territorially based realms such as media, the internet, television, music, literature and so on. At the same time, the Chilean communities are undeniably located within the Australian State and are therefore exposed to a nationalist discourse distinct from nationalist discourses in Chile. This dialectic between home and host is encountered on a daily basis and engages with a struggle over Chilean national identity; a struggle that is no less contested (or contestable) than the Australian identity. Stuart Hall has argued that identity is fluid and unsettling. He asserts that diaspora identities can be seen as ‘framed’ by two operative vectors: one of similarity and continuity, another of difference and rupture. He suggests that the narrative of displacement and difference impacts profoundly on certain immigrant subjects, while they simultaneously reach for that which is familiar and constant.21 Furthermore, as James Clifford explains, ‘[t]hey are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms’.22 This might otherwise be conceptualised by what Ernesto Laclau describes as the ‘articulated’ post‐modern identity.23 Subjects attach and detach different identity signifiers from their cultural palate in the performance of identity. Considering the 18
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positions of Bhabha and Gilroy on nationalism and identity, it is the performative transgression – the transformations generated by encounters between two or more ‘cultures’ – that produces dialogues about the ‘national’ and contribute to, but do not constitute, the construction of identity. The struggle to be both in and between ‘places’ operates on the identity of immigrants through the experience of migration as they are always ‘arriving from somewhere else’. This is a particularly dynamic struggle because the rhetoric in Australia is simultaneously one that promotes a ‘multicultural’ society, recognising the diverse influences on the nascent Australian culture and yet, it is also a discourse that is uncertain about how it defines membership to the Australian ‘type’.24 Australian identity is not yet able or willing to remove the explanatory hyphen between that place one is ‘from’ and the place one is ‘at’.25 This is because the simplistic use of the hyphen in, for instance Chilean‐Australian, draws attention to what is missing (the lack of hyphen required for unconditional membership), whilst simultaneously emphasizing the ‘ethnically’ defined cultural differences as sites of resistance to the national type.26 In the Australian context, this forms a paradox that works on immigrants as they are positioned as ‘ethnic’ subjects. Their ‘ethnicity’ is rhetorically referred to as contributing to the ‘diversity’ of the Australian community and yet, it is often viewed as signifying resistance to ‘traditional’ notions of Australian‐ness.27 This relationship is negotiated through identity‐constitutive dialogues between those who traverse these shifting, incongruent and yet overlapping spaces. Whilst the term ‘space’ may be used as a conceptual tool in the sense that Appadurai’s identity‐constitutive scapes exist ‘somewhere’, it must also be retained as a description of a physical entity.28 For Chilean‐Australians, the ability to traverse space, the very action of moving between Chile and Australia, has shaped the forming of their transnational identity in very different ways. Economic immigrants, whose identities are best described as cosmopolitan, have been able to enter and depart the physical locations within Chile and Australia with comparative ease. They have the cultural and economic capital to do so and they do not have quite so much at stake in the moving between spaces that are ‘Chilean’ or ‘Australian’ in geographic, cultural and ideological terms. For others, their experience of Chile is bound by trauma, disempowerment and violence and their renovated ideas of Chile are trapped by the needs of the diasporic imagination for resolution and return. One woman expressed this struggle to me in terms of travel between Chile and Australia: ‘Things have changed in Chile. Everyone has come here, and now they are returning. And then, some of them come back. This is another thing, Philippa, people work for years and years, they buy a house, a nice car and then they sell everything to move back to Chile. Then they find that they want to come back’.29 The transnational experiences of both groups have been literal, as well as imagined. Most Chileans in Australia would reflect the kind of transnationalism described by Basch et al30 that emphasises the physicality of transnational relationships, and some are able to fulfil Hannerz’ cultural criteria of the ‘able cosmopolite’.31 For diasporic communities, notions of arrival at and departure from imagined and distinct identity (and physical) spaces are crucial to the conceptualising of travelling identities. They act as coordinates for the employment or deployment of particular cultural codes that facilitate entry, membership and legitimacy. Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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Roots of the Chilean community in Australia There have essentially been four ‘waves’ of migration from Chile to Australia. The first occurred in the 1960s following industrialisation, amidst continuous political conflict and increasingly unstable economies across the region. Chileans who arrived in Australia at this time immigrated at the end of the post 1945 boom in the wake of the White Australia Policy. The second wave came in the years around 1970, in the lead‐up to and as a response to the election of the socialist Government headed by Salvador Allende. These Chileans were largely from the political right, fleeing what they feared would be a radical socialist regime. The third influx of migrants came after the 1973 military coup. These immigrants were fleeing into exile, escaping political persecution, torture and execution. The fourth wave may be considered as still ‘coming in’. It includes those who have arrived as participants in the Family Reunion Program and those who have immigrated independently to Australia following a period of steady economic growth and political stability in Chile. The greatest number of Chileans arrived in Australia during this period from 1973 to 1989; around 9,000 came between 1973 and 1978 and similar numbers arriving between 1984 and 198932. At the end of 2000, the Department of Immigration found that there were 23,370 Chileans residing in Australia33. The ‘everyday struggles’ of adjusting to life in a new country were matched by a direct and organized campaign during the 1970s and 1980s by many Chileans in Australia opposing the Pinochet dictatorship34. The participation of Chileans in formal politics, allied with Australian trade unions, established a strong organisational tradition of bringing together Chilean‐Australians for political, cultural and social activities. Chilean history and culture are also ‘kept alive’, re‐
articulated and experienced in Australia by various interest groups. Beyond organised modes of cultural expression, Chilean culture is increasingly consumed on a daily basis by way of technological advances. The internet and cable television have reduced economic barriers to purchasing satellite television taking the consumer beyond the filtered information of the Spanish‐language media and Esta Semana, a program made especially for Chileans living outside Chile. Chileans—and their Australian‐born children—are able to experience being Chilean through the direct consumption, not only of Chilean news and events, but also of popular culture. However, for some Chileans, their arrival in Australia as political refugees is a particular point of reference in the process of developing a sense of Australian‐ness. In the Australian context the migrant, particularly the refugee, has been awarded status of the ‘most’ Other: a status Ashish Nandy describes as the ‘intimate enemy’ in colonial times.35 Many Chileans came to Australia as political asylum seekers and their experience of being ‘in’ Australia is connected to the stigma of being a refugee. ‘All of the Chilean community that came over as refugees understand how hard it is ‐ after what you have been through, then arriving in a new country, where you can’t speak the language, or find a job in your field’.36 Therefore I would like to consider three sets of circumstances that affect the ways in which Chileans have engaged with the process of identity formation in Australia. Firstly, how does the immigrant engage with his/her own construction of the ‘other’ in relation to notions of Australian identity, particularly as defined by 20
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multiculturalism and especially in Prime Minister John Howard’s present post‐
multicultural age? Secondly, how are Chileans’ notions of Chilean‐ness disrupted or contested from ‘within’? And thirdly, to what extent do the movement and transfer of the immigrant subject affect these negotiations across increasingly globalised spaces? As Papastergiadis observes, ‘the arrival of a foreign text is never a perfect isomorph of another culture; it too, is formed by the travails of travelling’.37 This process is described by Fiedler, ‘I try to put together my own self ravaged by the separation of those two hemispheres I happen endlessly to move between without ever leaving, without ever returning, without ever arriving. I am Deluzean, I am experiencing the smoothness of the global’.38 In this way migrants cross over into the ‘territory’ of the ‘Australian’ disrupting the dominant myths, images and ideologies of Australia, exposing her struggle to come to terms with the presence of the ‘ethnic’ other. It cannot be assumed that assimilation to a new ‘national’ type is the inevitable and invariable outcome of immigration. On the contrary, this reading of identity suggests that it is possible to subscribe to multiple subjectivities at a time. This perspective is particularly useful when considering how identity studies can push postcolonial theory into a consideration of the postnational by focusing on the challenges posed to nationalism by migrants. Perceptions of ‘identity’: implications for Chilean immigrants in the Australian context As Stratton has observed, Australian identity has always been bound up in the idea of a ‘racially based Australian type’. Australian‐ness has always been defined against what has been considered to be ‘un‐Australian’ and race has operated here as ‘a marker to exclude those who were not considered to be eligible to be members of the nation’.39 Despite the advances made since the end of the White Australia policy, and the practice of official multiculturalism during the 1980s and early 1990s, race and ethnicity are still key determinates in the perception of ‘Australian‐ness’. The major criticism, or failing, of multiculturalism is well debated and Bhabha puts it simply when he says that the ‘universalism that paradoxically permits diversity masks ethnocentric norms, values and interests’.40 To be more precise, what is referred to as ‘ethnicity’ might be better understood as signifying a set of behaviours characteristic of or associated with a non‐Anglo culture. Therefore, ‘difference’ is the most prominent characteristic of what is referred to as ethnicity. This difference is linked in racist discourses in Australia to the notion of the ‘anti‐national’ or ‘un‐
Australian’. In a 2001 study on notions of ‘un‐Australian’, respondents41 said that group behaviour that reflected placing foreign influences or loyalties above those of Australia, or ‘ethnic separatism’, was seen as an affront to Australian values and norms of civility.42 Whilst overtly racist attitudes, such as those presented by Pauline Hanson were also held to be ‘un‐Australian’, the beliefs expressed by Hanson were reflected in the view that by ‘allegedly remaining in ghettos, neglecting to learn English and failing to assimilate, certain minorities were perceived to be separatist, thumbing their noses at other Australians’.43 Gassan Hage sees this focus on the perceived resistance of immigrants to the prescribed Australian identity as a challenge to the ‘fantasy of white supremacy’.44 The implicit contradictions in the way in which nationalism is evoked in the Australian context reveal the racist Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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undertones of both the nationalist and the multicultural projects. Essentially this has created a potent confusion in the Australian psyche, affecting new immigrants as profoundly as it affects those with colonial heritage. Several responses to my questions about how people viewed their own national identity were also caught‐up in the contradictions exposed by Hage’s critique of the ‘myth of white supremacy’. Most participants also recognized that ethnic difference affected their place in the national discourse, but that membership could be achieved through participation and being part of the community. As one interview participant put it, ‘I feel that I am part of the development of this society…It’s not like I forced myself to become part of it. But over the years I became part of it. That’s helped me a lot. The way that I see others, the way that I function within society because I feel part of something’.45 The contradictions also reinforce the divisions. The focus on difference, so greatly valued in the discourse of multiculturalism denies the ‘ethnic’ subject full membership to the traditionally defined Australian national subject. However, transnational identities are able to subvert the self‐appointed authority of nationalist discourse by creating alternative spaces that have greater perceived value than the ‘national’. For instance, the ‘local’ community is seen as a microcosm of society, while the transnational spaces are what contain the greater ‘community’. This suggests that whilst theories of hybridity or Hage’s reading of the dynamics of multicultural identity in relation to a white core are valuable, they are not authoritative or exhaustive. The articulated identities of migrants suggest that whilst transnational identities are affected by essentially racist discourses of assimilation, integration and multiculturalism, they are also able to disengage from these identity spaces and create and interact with identity spaces that are evoked under different sets of conditions. This contributes to the on‐going negotiation of self‐identity. Several people who were interviewed pointed out that they will never be able to ‘not be Chilean. That is where I was born. That is who I was’,46 and yet they also stressed the fact that it is equally impossible in this sense not to feel ‘Australian’ too. One particular participant noted that, by virtue of her highly traumatic experiences and subsequent departure from Chile, she felt she ‘owed’ a lot to Australia, and that this gratitude formed the basis of her loyalty and identification as part of the Australian community.47 Hage observes that non‐Anglo immigrants to Australia have consistently found that the extent of their ‘Australian‐ness’ is continuously being called into question, that they must ‘prove’ that they are just as Australian as any Anglo‐Australian.48 This suggests that the non‐Anglo subject is constantly referring back to a ‘white’ centre to measure their relative closeness or distance from this ‘desired’ model. However, at the same time, the Chileans in this study express an identity that is not represented within the historical imaginary of the Australian nation. This reflects self‐referencing to and the active recreation of a foreign past and present, further evidence of active identification with a transnational identity. For several interviewees, this is manifest in their experiences of return to Chile and being confronted by a reality that did not fit their imagined place. ‘So the first time I went back I am sitting there trying to be normal, trying to be myself, after 18 years, trying to be one of them, blah, blah. And I thought about my freedom there, and I observed people and how they act. And I was shocked. Because, in my 22
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days, in my days there to 1975… you talked to people around, you started a conversation with the person sitting next to you. There was some kind of conversation or inter‐relation to, actually even on the micro.49 But now there is nothing. And that was the first indication for me that things have changed’.50 Simultaneously, the process of struggling with the notion of what is or was Chilean in them helps them to form an understanding of their own ‘Australian‐ness’. This is particularly challenging to the broader discourse of Hage’s great ‘white myth’ because it demonstrates that immigrants do not construct their identity only in response to a ‘white’ core culture. Rather, their experiences of migration and return, of negotiating the changes in their ‘indigenous’ sense of identity is an equally powerful point of reference.51 These identities are essentially transnational ones created because of the need, and the ability, to imagine identities that are not confined by the boundaries of the nation state.52 In the case of Chile, these different identities are composed with specific political and historical points of reference. Most importantly, these points of reference vary dramatically depending on the individual stories of Chilean immigrants. The production of their transnational identity is due to, specific but varying, historical and political conditions. This is simultaneously positioned in conflict with the dominant identity of the host country, one that is definitively based on the exclusion of difference.53 Therefore Chilean‐Australians are in a constant process of ‘playing out’ different articulated identities that ‘travel’ across the scapes described by Appadurai in response to notions of difference. This idea has particular resonance when considered within the context of the current debate over refugees. This point was emphasised by one interviewee who stated that she could never forget why she came to Australia, and what she went through and that she did not feel, although she wanted to, as though she was free of the stigma of ‘refugee’.54 Another felt that by denying recognition of the positive contribution that refugees have made to the Australian community, the dominant discourse was really denying them full ‘membership’ as Australian: ‘Well, yes, every individual has different experiences, but sometimes when you meet, when you speak about the issues of refugees there is a lot of sadness, you know ‘I had such a bad time’. Yeah, well okay we had that but, I say, well it is time for us to celebrate our contribution to the development of this society. Yeah, we have to say that we suffered, we have to tell people our experiences. We have to tell that it is horrible to leave everything that you have and just go, to be tortured or traumatized, it’s awful. But we have to highlight that yeah, also we have contributed to this society. You see there are many, many refugees in Fairfield and you find them in all areas, so it’s time for us to celebrate our contribution to this society, to the City of Fairfield’.55 The Chilean national identity is loosely held together with the histories of colonial life, the independence struggles and the folklore that has emerged over time in the unique hybridity of the meztizo (mixed lineage). Yet, for all, participation in ‘building a community’ and ‘independence’ (for example, from the welfare system) are seen as signifiers of ‘Australian‐ness’. In general, most people felt a great deal of pride in how much they had achieved since arriving in Australia. The ability to find their way in what was perceived to be a sometimes hostile society gave many people Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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the ‘right’ to identify as Australian. As one woman observed: ‘I have a good job and a nice house, a new car. I have worked hard and I feel as though I belong here’.56 One participant felt that he had never fully been accepted in Australia, but because he no longer felt like he only belonged in Chile he ‘sort of felt Australian too, if you know what I mean’.57 In this way, space is also understood and experienced in terms of actual territory and the binding of the national is possible via economic, political, cultural, social, gendered (and so on) spheres. Thus, the territoriality of a subject impacts uniquely on their negotiation of identity politics. In Australia discourses around immigration mobilise debates that are sited in terms of both the ‘imaginary’ space occupied by the ‘national type’ and the ‘real’ space in which the ‘national type’ claims naturalism. In this debate the national character derives its qualities from the type of national subject that doesn’t, or wouldn’t, threaten the imagined or real space of the national. These debates invoke a need to ‘defend’ Australian territory and, particularly, standards of living and notions of terrain are directly, forcefully and powerfully linked to ideas about identity and membership to the national ’type’.58 The print media as part of Appadurai’s mediascape, is one space in which discourses on belonging and exclusion are produced and consumed. In the case of the Spanish‐
language press, we can observe the ways in which transnational subjects engage with, and transform, national identity politics. Here I have analysed the reportage in three Spanish‐language papers around the time of the Tampa crisis as a way of thinking about how immigrant subjects engage with debates around immigration and ‘border control’. Three commercial papers were selected due to their national coverage59 and comparative circulation60. El Español was the first Spanish‐language weekly in Australia, commencing operation in 1964. The Spanish Herald and El Extra Informativo began in 1975 and 1979 respectively and Radio Austral (produced along with El Extra Informativo by Austral News) began in 1992. The style of reporting and the level of coverage differ from paper to paper.61 Spanish Herald had comparatively less coverage of the refugee issue, but articles that were published defended the practice of mandatory detention, advocating for defensive responses by the Government62. At the time of the Tampa incident there was significant front page coverage that was entirely in favour of the government’s responses: “Boat with 438 refugees causes serious problem for Australia”63; “Australia defends its position over refugees”64; “Australia brings an end to the ‘Tampa Crisis’”65. In addition, the Editorial columns are seriously supportive of the Government and its policies. The Editorial from the 30th of August 2001 states: ‘Australia must demand that immigrants enter by the legal channels and that they comply with the laws of the country. Australia is our house and we will not allow anyone to enter it without our permission’. And the editorial on the 1st of September, 2001 reads: ‘It is a triumph that the asylum seekers were not able to step foot on Australian soil…it has sent a powerful message to those involved in human trafficking. We don’t believe that the Australian authorities have been inhumane in denying entrance to ‘intruders’, much less for acting exactly as they should have for many years’. El Español also gave consistent coverage of the asylum seekers issue, prior to and following the Tampa incident. Articles were concerned with the conditions in which asylum seekers are kept, laws relating to selective immigration, and in direct 24
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relation to the Tampa incident, the uncertainty that the situation created for the asylum seekers, the damage that was done to the reputation of Australia, and generally, the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers on the part of the Government. Feature article headlines such as, ’Woomera, an Australian Hell’66, ‘A Dubious Proposition for Defense’67 and ‘Trapped in political limbo: the Federal Government dehumanizes refugees and manipulates public opinion’68 suggest a general position taken by the paper that is in opposition to the Government’s policies. However, some articles refer to asylum seekers as ‘illegals’, and give significant weight to arguments about the threat to the standard of living and the security of Australia. These variations reflect the diversity of opinions as well as the confusions and contradictions implicit in the current debate. For example, a poem entitled ‘Children of Woomera’69 , a protest against the treatment of children, in detention centres was answered by a scathing letter that claimed that ‘if the children of invaders stay, their parents must also stay and this end they will pursue, filling Australia with “illegals” and refugees of dubious origins’70. The threat of physical invasion is closely linked with ideas about ‘cultural invasion’. The ‘up‐standing’ character of the ‘legitimate immigrant’ begins to align itself with discourses around Australian‐ness. By contrast, El Extra Informativo, was outspoken and openly damning of the government’s actions in relation to this topic. They have consistently criticised the government for manipulating the Tampa and the ‘Children Overboard’ incidents during the 2001 election campaign71. They published features and editorials that investigate the political and moral position of the government’s policies in great depth72. These are pieces that clearly demonstrate the position of the editorial staff on the issue: ‘Immigrants are a true luxury for a society…They are people who enrich their host countries. The terrible part is what we do to these people. What has happened in the case of the refugees who arrive as ‘boat people’ is one example of our stupidity: we cannot treat these immigrants, who intend to pursue decent futures, like they are diseased and hide them away in impenetrable sheds, hundreds of kilometres from ‘Australian civilization’, without transport and with no way of communicating with the Australian people. In the end they are marginalized, dehumanized, and to top it all off, they are criminalized’.73 This paragraph demonstrates the political views of the editor while clearly indicating that he sees himself as a member of the Australian community. Whilst these examples cannot claim to reflect the opinion of the community in its entirety, or its diversity, they demonstrate the range of opinions within the Spanish speaking community and lead us to believe that there are polarised views on the issue of refugees, although immigration in general is seen as a separate debate. The differences seem related to the idea of invasion and loss of control. What is also interesting is that, whilst the participants interviewed for this study all said that they were against the current policy of detaining boat people, most didn’t think that Australia should be taking more immigrants, regardless of their reasons. At a Refugee Week activity organised in Cabramatta in September 2001 one man noted that some Chileans were upset about the discussion on the treatment of refugees: ‘One Chilean man came to me and he said, “I do not agree with what that Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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woman is saying.” I said, “well okay, you have a right to disagree”, and he said “well I don’t think she should be saying what she is saying” and I said “why” and he said “because she is attacking the government”’.74 Loyalty to a government, or to the State, has been fiercely evoked in the mainstream political debate in the last few years. Since the election of the Howard Government and the rise of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party, the issue of (un)Australian‐ness has been high on the political agenda. Recent events including the Tampa incident, the attacks on the World Trade Centre buildings, the escalating crises in the Israel/Palestinian conflict and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn into question concepts of nationhood and the state sovereignty. These have been implicated with notions of ethnicity and religious and ideological beliefs that distinguish the ‘thems’ from the ‘us‐es’, the ‘goodies’ from the ‘baddies’. The debate around refugees (on a global scale) and the particular response of the Australian government to people arriving in Australia by boat in order to apply for refugee status provokes different responses in people, regardless of their experiences as political refugees or economic immigrants. In this way, diaspora and cosmopolitan communities interact with dominant political discourses, particularly with the way that national identity and patriotism has been linked with the idea of border protection. At the Borderpanic Symposium held at the MCA in Sydney 22nd October 2002, Ghassan Hage discussed the current Australian context as representing a shift whereby the rhetoric of the nation creates paranoia and insecurity, resulting in a kind of xenophobic and insular reaction. This idea is useful when considering why some immigrants support the ‘raising of the drawbridge’. It suggests that the alliance with an anti‐immigration stance in some ways protects the position of the immigrant from accusations of un‐Australian‐ness. This is a curious and concerning phenomenon that warrants further investigation. As one member of a social service organisation told me: ‘Say okay…we have to have one position as an organisation telling the government that they are not doing the right thing in relation to the refugee I am not sure that we would get that stand from our management committee. And I am not quite sure how many management committees in the area would get it because there is a very subtle intimidation by the Department of Immigration. It is very subtle but it is there. And ah, when you go to meetings or Department of Immigration information session or whatever you can sense that. No‐one wants to speak because they are afraid to lose their funding’.75 This raises many questions that fall beyond the scope of this paper. However, they are questions that suggest that immigrant identities must also negotiate structural and political forces. More specifically they demonstrate that immigrants are in a constant process of cultural modification and codification across all of Appadurai’s different ‘scapes’. Traversing space as identity construction Stuart Hall advocates for the theorization of identity precisely because it enables us to conceptualize new kinds of subjects.76 Theorising identity establishes new places 26
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‘from which to speak’ and, as this paper argues, renders visible the places—outside the discourse of the national—where dialogues are constantly being created. The experience of Chilean‐Australians in migrating to Australia, living in Australia and adopting, rejecting, interchanging and recreating identity characteristics which are extracted from experience, memory and imagination, are filtered through discourses of the national, just as they are affected by political and historical events. In this way, they actively engage with constructions of ‘the other’ through the discourses of multiculturalism and nationalism. The formation of identity in Chilean‐Australians is equally, if not more so, affected by being in and passing through the transnational spaces between ‘home’ and ‘host’. Different experiences across virtual and geographical space are articulated in relation to notions of being and belonging to both a ‘Chilean’ and ‘Australian’ type. These articulations are framed by the movement of the immigrant subject, facilitated and disrupted by the imperatives of space. These frames can be seen in the ‘everyday’ expressions of cultural and political debate in individual meditations on ‘what it means to be [insert nationality here] and in relation to public debates in which notions of ‘belonging’ are firmly anchored to concepts of physical and conceptual borders. This suggests that the notion of the ‘national’ is not the central force when it comes to transforming migrant identities. They are not sculptured by linear routes to nationality, but are always moving between concepts of ‘host’ and ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘exclusion’ along trajectories that are constantly entering and exiting the spatial realms of the national. Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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NOTES
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Interview with ‘Vera’: 29.05.02, Fairfield, N.S.W – all interviews use pseudonyms. Kevin McDonald, Struggles for Subjectivity: Identity, Action and Youth Experience Cambridge University Press, Singapore, 1999. 3 ibid., p.10. 4 J. Rutherford, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1990. 5 UNHCR state that in 1991 there were 16.8 million and in 2004 9.2 million refugees worldwide UNHCR ‘Basic Facts’ ‘http://www.unhcr.org/cgi‐bin/texis/vtx/events/opendoc.pdf?tbl=STATISTICS &id=42b283744 6 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p.32. 7 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography’ in P. Yaeger, ed. The Geography of Identity, University of Michigan, USA, 1996, p.40. 8 ibid., p.42. 9 Jon Stratton, ‘Not Just Another Multicultural Story’, Journal of Australian Studies, 66 (2000) p.23. [electronic version] 10 Jon Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998, p.106. 11 ibid., p.206, 12 Gassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White supremacy in a multicultural society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998. 13 Appadurai, Modernity; Sovereignty. 14 Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, 1990.; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994. 15 Stuart Hall ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in J. Rutherford, ed., Identity: Culture, Community, Difference, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990, pp. 222 ‐ 237; ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’ in S. Hall, D. Held, & T. McGrew, eds., Modernity and its Futures Polity Press in Assoc. with the Open University, Cambridge, 1992. pp.274 ‐ 315; ‘New Ethnicities’ in D. Morley, & C. Kuan‐Hsing, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge, London, 1996, 441 ‐ 449 16 Stratton, Multicultural; Race Daze; Hage. 17 A. Gupta & J. Ferguson, ‘Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference’ in Cultural Anthropology, 7,1 (1992), pp.6 – 23; p.7. 18 P. Webner and T. Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity, Zed Books, London, 1997, p.16. 19 Appadurai, Modernity, p. 33. 20 ibid. 21 Hall, Cultural Identity, pp.226;236. 22 James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’ in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen, eds., Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., Cheltenham, 1999, p.307. 23 Hall, Question, pp.278 – 279. 24 Australian ‘type’ in this sense evokes images and stereotypes promoted as specifically NOT ethnic, NESB, migrant Australians. This draws from the way in which Stratton uses the notion of an ‘Australian type’ in his book, Race Daze (1998). 25 P. Gilroy, ‘It ain’t where you’re from, It’s where you’re at…The Dialectics of Diaspora Identification’ in Third Text 13 Winter, 1991 pp.3‐16 cited in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen, eds., Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., Cheltenham, 1999. 26 ibid., p. 281. 27 Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, ’What it means to be an Australian Citizen’, Commonwealth Government of Australia, ACT, 1997; P. Smith and T. Phillips, ‘Popular understandings of ‘UnAustralian’: an investigation of the un‐national’, Journal of Sociology, 37, 4 (2001), pp.323–42 28 L. Schien, ‘Forged Transnationality and Operational Cosmopolitanism’ in M. P. Smith and L. E. Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1998, pp.291–
313. 29 Interview with ‘Vera’. 30 L. Basch, N.G. Schiller and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projections, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation –States, Gordon and Breach, Langhorne, PA, 1994. 31 U. Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places Routledge, London, 1996. 2
28
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32 Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research, Community Profiles, 1991 Census, Chile Born, Australian Government Publishing Service, ACT, 1991. 33 Multicultural Affairs Branch and the Economic and Demographic Analysis Section of DIMIA 2003 Community Information Summay: The Chilean‐born community online, 2003, available at: http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/stat_info/comm_summ/chile.pdf (2 June 2006) 34 G.A. Martin Montenegro, ‘La Campania de solidaridad de Australia con Chile: 1973 – 1990’, MA thesis, University of New South Wales, 1994, pp.44–46. 35 Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘Tracing Hybridity in Theory’ in P. Webner and T. Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti‐Racism, Zed Books, London. 1997, p.267. 36 Interview with ‘Marcelo’: 19.05.02, Canley Vale, NSW 37 Papstergiadis, p.272. 38 Sergio Fiedler, ‘Beyond Pinochet: Class, Power and Desire in Pinochet’s Chile’, PhD Thesis, School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 42 39 Stratton, Race Daze, p.9. 40 Rutherford, p.208 41 Respondents included people from non‐Anglo backgrounds. 42 Smith and Philips, p.12. 43 ibid. 44 Hage, p.209. 45 Interview with ‘Fernando’: 29.05.02, Fairfield, NSW. 46 Interview with ‘Marcelo’: 19.05.02, Canley Vale, NSW. 47 Interview with ‘Vera’: 29.05.02, Fairfield, NSW. 48 Hage, pp.218‐219. 49 Micro is the common usage term for public bus. 50 Interview with ‘Fernando’: 29.05.02, Fairfield, NSW. 51 Nikos Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diaspora: essays and conversations on cultural identity, Rivers Oram Press, London, New York, 1998, p.31. 52 Vertovec, p.1. 53 I. Hassan, ‘Counterpoints: Nationalism, colonialism, multiculturalism etc. in personal perspective’, in Bennett ed., Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, Routledge, London 1998, p.28. 54 Interview with ‘Vera’. 55 Interview with ‘Fernando’: 29.05.02, Fairfield, NSW. 56 Interview with ‘Natalia’: 05.08.02, Strathfield, NSW. 57 Interview with ‘Jose’: 15.08.02, Canterbury, NSW. 58 Interviews with Christian (01.08.02, Sydney City, NSW); ‘Natalia’; ‘Vera’; and, ‘Jose’ (15.08.02, Cantebury, NSW). 59 Around 50% of Spanish speakers reside in NSW, with a further 25% in Melbourne. All three papers are sold in newsagents in Sydney and Melbourne with distribution by subscription to all other parts of Australia. 60 Papers have the following print run: Spanish Herald distributes 15,000 (twice weekly); El Extra Informative 25,000; and, El Español 19,000 per week. 61 All text was translated from Spanish to English by the author. 62 Spanish Herald (SH), ‘Illegal Immigrants’ 21 July 2001, p.2.; ‘Government will be stricter with illegal immigrants’ 4 August 2001, p.4. 63 SH, 30 August 2001, pp.1; 3. 64 SH, 01 September 2001, p.1. 65 SH 01 September 2001, p.3. 66 El Español (EE), 9 January 2002, p.3. 67 EE, 21 November 2001, p.3. 68 EE 11 September 2001, p.3. 69 EE 09 April 2002, p.18. 70 EE 23 April 2002, p.17. 71 El Extra Informativo (EEI), ‘The danger of an election lie’, 20‐26 February 2002 p.7; ‘Morality and The State’, 24‐30 April 2002, p. 11. Collin/A Post-National Reading of Identity
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72 EEI, ‘Immigrants’, 15‐21 May 2002 p.1; ‘A solution for illegal refugees cannot be postponed’, 30 January – 5 February 2002, pp.20‐21. 73 EEI, Editorial Comment, ’Immigrants’, 15‐21 May 2002 p.1 74 Interview with Fernando. 75 ibid. 76 Hall, Cultural Identity. 30
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