Undoing attitudes: subjectivity and ethical change in theGo Back to Where You Came Fromdocumentary

Abstract

In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the relationship between attitude, as a performative articulation of selfhood, and ethics of non-violence and welcome. Exploring how attitude change has been represented in the narrative of the Go Back To Where You Came From documentary, it is argued that attitude is a concept indelibly fixed within discourses of refugee arrivals in Australia and attitude change regularly posited as the process towards ethics. An example of attitude change in the documentary is discussed through Butler's ethics of non-violence and the ways in which recognition and the recognizability of the other operate to promote or stem an ethical responsiveness or welcome. This is followed by looking at how the Butler's account of frames as the social and political mechanisms that can prevent the recognition of the other as human or worthy of hospitality can be expanded to show how the production of an ethical relationship is aided by a disturbance in selfhood such that a subject can recognize his or her own vulnerability and hence the vulnerability of the other. How an expanded theory of ethics and hospitality plays out through attitude change is highlighted.Australian government policies on population, immigration and responses towards a relatively minor rate of boat arrivals of refugees and asylum seekers, and methods of assessment of individual refugees, are not today driven by questions of justice, nor by precedent, international conventions or agreements. Rather, as has increasingly been argued (Aly 2010), government border protection and immigration policies are guided by polling on public attitudes towards a 'refugee problem', which relate more to planning for the future electoral successes of the incumbent government than to impartial policies or continuity of administration. This is what commentator Ross Gittins (2011) refers to as leaders 'pandering to our dark side -our fears, our weaknesses, our selfishness'. That fact leads to important questions as to the role of attitude in contemporary culture, how and why particular attitudes towards refugees are constituted and how attitudes towards refugees can change.Attitude, as a habitual mode of regard towards an object of thought, is a complex term typically discussed within the field of psychology. While the idea of attitude itself is both problematic and under-theorized from a cultural perspective, it is a term that is frequently and specifically invoked in discussions around the perception of refugees, the notion of a refugee problem and public understanding of government policy and international conventions. Its relative absence from cultural theory thus becomes notable when critically engaging with popular perspectives on refugees in the Australian context, and its q 2013 Taylor & Francis *

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