Domestic belongings: Intimate security and the racial politics of scale
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.