Elsevier

Emotion, Space and Society

Volume 4, Issue 4, November 2011, Pages 203-210
Emotion, Space and Society

Domestic belongings: Intimate security and the racial politics of scale

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.11.001Get rights and content

Abstract

This article aims to explore the phenomenon of White ressentiment in recent Australian politics by tracing the affective mobilization of ‘home’ in the political backlash against multiculturalism through government and media discourse. Beginning with the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the first section draws on Lauren Berlant’s work in order to recast Hansonism as an intimate public that utilized ‘home’ as a means of fostering affective identification with White belonging in a multicultural context. The following section explores how Hansonism centred the national imaginary upon a White domesticity, which functioned to create a correspondence between the White family home and the Australian nation. In doing so, Hansonism refashioned migrant (particularly Asian) homes as being unheimlich to the nation. The third section traces how this ‘homely nation’ continued to affect race politics under John Howard’s national security agenda. The conclusion reflects on two arguments that emerge through the article, which give the article its subtitle. The first concerns what I term ‘intimate security’ by which I signal the ways in which domains of security and intimacy converge. I argue that the stability, comfort and intimacy associated with the family home and family values become emblematic of the secure nation such that public insecurity is often felt as a nostalgia for a lost home. However, this intimate security is founded upon a White domesticity, such that non-White migrants are rendered unheimlich to the nation. The term ‘racial politics of scale’ is used to render the ways in which scalar imaginaries are used to secure particular configurations of race.

Section snippets

Domestic commonsense: Hansonism as an intimate public

In order to fully understand the ‘home’ as it functions in Hansonism, it is important to gain an appreciation of the historical significance of Hanson in the political history of race relations in Australia. The formation of the Australian Federation in 1901 was fostered by anxieties of coloured labour in the northern states of Australia, particularly Chinese and Indian labour (Evans et al., 1988, Markus, 1979, Markus, 1994).1

Intimate security: Unheimlich migrants and the lost home

As I argued above, White national belonging in Hansonism produced an intimate public as a shared affective configuration, recognizable through the immediate feelings of familiarity, comfort and security associated with the family home. By anchoring itself in the commonsense of the White domestic sphere, Hansonism was able to occupy the space of the ‘ordinary’ and associate this with Whiteness without importantly naming it as such. In this instance, ‘home’ functions as a “multi-scalar spatial

Homegrown terrorism: Homeland security under John Howard

Despite Hanson’s brief appearance in Australian federal politics, Hansonism’s articulation of the ‘home’ continued to influence Australian politics under Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s rule. Indeed, part of Howard’s success relied on his ability to re-occupy the space of ‘ordinary or mainstream Australia’ by investing in the myth of ‘lost family values’ espoused by Hansonism. This was evidenced by a series of public information campaigns targeting the family home from 2001 to 2007. In

Conclusion

Although the invocation of the nation as a home is not new, what I have tried to show in this article is how Hansonism’s invocation of the “homely nation” was able to re-centre and re-privilege White national belonging within multicultural Australia. ‘Ordinary’, ‘mainstream’ Australia became metonymically linked to Whiteness by premising its conception of the nation upon White domesticity without naming it as White. I wish to stress that I am not suggesting that migrants cannot find ways to

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Elspeth Probyn for her numerous comments and ongoing support and Sara Ahmed, Kane Race and Lawrence Grossberg for commenting on older versions of this article. Also thanks to Pal Ahluwalhia for supporting my move to South Australia and for his intellectual generosity. This research has been made possible by the generous funding of the Australian Postgraduate Award and College of Social Sciences Research Award granted to me by the University of Sydney as well as my current

Gilbert Caluya Gilbert Caluya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of South Australia currently researching Islamic diversity in Australia. He completed his PhD thesis “Terror’s Terroritoris: Fear, Politics and Everyday Space” in 2008 with the Gender and Cultural Studies Department, University of Sydney where he taught for several years. His research interests include everyday security and surveillance, affect and emotion, the cultural politics of intimacy, queer theory and

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    Gilbert Caluya Gilbert Caluya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of South Australia currently researching Islamic diversity in Australia. He completed his PhD thesis “Terror’s Terroritoris: Fear, Politics and Everyday Space” in 2008 with the Gender and Cultural Studies Department, University of Sydney where he taught for several years. His research interests include everyday security and surveillance, affect and emotion, the cultural politics of intimacy, queer theory and critical race theory.

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