Debating the Nation: Dealing with Difference and Incommensurability
The focus of this chapter is to examine social construction of a contemporary nation. This will first allow us to comment on the racialised discourse that produces a white Australia and second further contextualise the question ‘How do rural people who id
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Debating the Nation: Dealing with Difference and Incommensurability
2.1 Introduction The focus of this chapter is to examine social construction of a contemporary nation. This will first allow us to comment on the racialised discourse that produces a white Australia and second further contextualise the question ‘How do rural people who identify as white Australian think about race and Australian identity in the context of Indigenous sovereignty in their everyday lives?’ Part of the answer to this question requires an exploration of the social construction of the nation. Until the past few decades, the modern nation has remained ‘the one most untheorized concept of the modern world’ (Chatterjee, 1993, p. xi) and is therefore the centre of this chapter. The Australian nation imagines itself to be sovereign and remains invested in the narrative and material power of colonisation. The key point is to consider how the nation may stop imagining itself as sovereign and hence divest itself of the power of ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). First, this section reviews the concept of the nation as an abstract community in order to theorise the nation as a social construction that has a social and political history and imagines itself as sovereign. Three key areas are presented, towards addressing the issue of racialisation in the process of creating a nation out of a federation of invader colonies in order to meet the book’s objectives. The first objective poses the problem of the Australian nation as a racialised entity. The second objective considers whether the framework of multiculturalism obscures race in its © The Author(s) 2020 C. Koerner and S. Pillay, Governance and Multiculturalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23740-0_2
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attempt to deal with diversity. Third, in response to the quote above by Moreton-Robinson (2007, pp. 101–102), modern Western nations are conceived as invader societies in the context of Indigenous sovereignty. Subsequent chapters discuss these issues in detail and therefore build the conceptual framework for the book. As Chapter 1 discussed, three key public debates in Australia drew attention to race throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. They highlighted the disparity in contemporary relationships between the racialised subject positions of people living in Australia: first, Native Title and land rights cases, particularly Mabo, Wik, Yorta Yorta, and the Hindmarsh Island Bridge, drew a large amount of national media coverage; second, Pauline Hanson and a backlash against diversity and minority lobby groups labelled ‘interest groups’, particularly those marked by race; and third, Aboriginal Reconciliation, including whether there should be a national apology to the stolen generations. Because of these debates, it is unlikely that people in Australia are unaware of white spaces as juxtaposed against Black spaces and this is analysed in detail in Sect. 7.2. Further, these debates grew out of multiple histories of migration and colonisa
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