Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8kt4b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T12:36:17.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Politics of Belonging in a Mediated Society: A Contribution to the Conceptual Exegesis

from Part I - THEORIZING BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2018

Val Colic-Peisker
Affiliation:
associate professor of sociology in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS) at RMIT University
Get access

Summary

Introduction

This chapter provides a conceptual introduction to the central theme of this volume – the way media, politics and belonging intersect in the ethnoculturally diverse Australia of the early twenty- first century. I undertake an intersectional analysis of four conceptual triads: ‘belonging- identity- community’; ‘media- communication- representation’; ‘Australia- politics- discourse’ and ‘reality- construction- perception’. In this section, the chapter first introduces key features of the Australian context in relation to the book's central interest.

Modern Australia is a ‘settler nation’ that developed through successive, progressively more diverse waves of immigration, dislodging and dispossessing the Indigenous population in the process. From the very start in the late eighteenth century, the colonizers were ethnically diverse, contravening the ideal of white Britishness (Moreton- Robinson 2006).

The 1901 federation of British colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia created the first new nation of the twentieth century. The considerable ethnocultural diversity of the nineteenth century was politically denounced and the ideal of a ‘white Australia’ pursued for the next 70 years (DIBP 2016). The enactment of the first major law of the Commonwealth parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act of December 1901, was primarily a reaction to the arrival of a significant number of Chinese during the Gold Rush. In the 1850s, the colonies of Victoria and South Australia introduced restrictions on Chinese immigration, prompted by the white miners’ resentment towards industrious Chinese on the goldfields (DIBP 2016). These restrictions were later repealed as the free movement of people was highly valued in the midnineteenth century (Bashford 2014), the period historian Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘age of capital’, ruled by what Germans called Manchesterismus – the ‘free trade orthodoxy of Victorian Britain’ (Hobsbawm 1996/ 1975: 303). However, the restrictions were reintroduced in all Australian colonies in the period 1870s – 1890s. The Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act 1901 continued and reinforced this race policy where ‘prohibited immigrants’ were all ‘non- Europeans’. According to Bashford (2014, 31–32), these restrictions were part of ‘great white walls’ protecting the Anglosphere (Australia, United States, New Zealand) from ‘contamination’ by ‘coloured races’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×