The paradox of Whiteness: Neoliberal multiculturalism and the case of Chinese international students in Australia

Abstract

Since its formal inception in the 1970s, Australian (ethno-) ‘multiculturalism’ has been a source of debate over the nation’s imagined trajectory. This internal or national discourse has, inter alia, critiqued the unchanging racialised power relations between groups, where ethnocultural plurality becomes subsumed under a predominant White governmentality. In this article, however, we consider a particular difficulty in sustaining a ‘truly’ multicultural narrative of contemporary Australian society from an extra-national perspective. To do so, we draw from in-depth interviews with 28 Chinese international students (CIS) in Australia to examine how a White Australia is constructed and normalised from outside the state. We utilise these perspectives to argue for the importance of considering extra-national factors in maintaining this racialised imaginary of Australia as a White nation. This argument also foregrounds the challenge of Australia’s neoliberal multiculturalism project in capitalising on a normative multiculturalism on the international stage, highlighting an extra-national difficulty to fully commit to a multicultural re-imagining of the nation that is divorced from a racialist narrative. This further presents a conundrum for the Australian state racialised as White. That is, the need to relinquish a White face to engender better social cohesion amongst its ethnoculturally diverse populations paradoxically exists in tandem with the need to maintain a White face for the attraction of more diversity, at least for economic benefits in this globalised, neoliberal era.

In the Saunas I’m Either Invisible or Camouflaged: Colonial Fantasies and Imaginations in Sydney’s Gay Saunas

“…The notion of neoliberal multiculturalism has also sparked a heated debate in South America, where the Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui’s pioneering notion of the permitted Indian in a workshop (Hale 2004) explains how the Bolivian state allowed Indians certain expressions of their culture that were beneficial to the state while violently suppressing any criticism from the Indians, giving them a “conditional inclusion” in Bolivian society only where their presence was beneficial to the country’s multicultural aspirations (Rivera-Cusicanqui 2012, 97). Seet and Zhao’s (2021) study of multiculturalism in Australia similarly shows how Australia is constructed as a white nation not only from within, but also from outside, supported by globalized and racialized neoliberalism, a construction that has an important impact on Chinese migrants’ living in Australia.…”

Affective News, Affective Labor: Chinese Female “Little Editors” of WeChat Official Accounts in Australia

“…We pay them 50 (AUD) for each article. Camille suggested that racial exclusion pushed Chinese international students away from the dominant (White) job market in Australia (Seet & Zhao, 2021) toward the Chinese migrant economy where co-ethnicity was considered an advantage. For Camille, neoliberal co-ethnic exploitation was legitimized while being unspoken and being exploited was considered more advantageous than unemployment.…”

Securing the borders of English and Whiteness

“…One answer to this conundrum that has recently been proposed on the pages of this journal relates to Australia’s neoliberal economy (Seet and Zhao, 2021). Immigration, international education, and tourism are key pillars of the Australian economy, even if the 2020 border closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic may have put them on hold temporarily.…”

“…This internationalization program rests on the continued attraction of new temporary and permanent migrants, international students, and tourists. The economic desire to attract ever more diverse people to Australia perversely engenders a symbolic need to maintain “a White face” for marketing purposes, as Seet and Zhao (2021) argue. Indeed, the “White face” of Australia—imagining White and English-speaking Australians as core members of the nation and everyone else as peripheral—is widely underwritten by Australians with hegemonic and non-hegemonic identities alike, as we have repeatedly documented in our research (Piller and Takahashi, 2013; Smith-Khan, 2019b; Torsh, 2020).…”

“…In this article, we extend the economic perspective provided by Seet and Zhao (2021), to include a security and entertainment dimension in Australia’s White-English paradox. We do so by examining the contradiction between a high level of de facto diversity and imagined homogeneity in the popular reality TV show Border Security: Australia’s Front Line .…”