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October 20, 2009
Paraniod nationalism --a review of Ghassan Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking by Peta Stephenson. Stephenson says:
If there is one common theme that underpins this rather disparate collection, it is that White Australians are now in a state of worry about the nation more than caring about it and their fellow citizens. Hage describes societies as mechanisms for the production and distribution of hope. In the Australian case, years of neo-liberalist policies combined with the globalisation of capital have meant that the majority of White Australians have lost any sense of hope they once held of achieving a better life for themselves and their children. Instead of being hopeful, Anglo-Celtic Australians are now anxious, suspicious and ungenerous. White Australia is currently experiencing an acute obsession with border control and with paranoid fantasies about the ability of internal and external 'Others' to seize control of the country. In short, worrying has become the dominant White Australian mode of expressing attachment to the nation.
She says that for Hage this defensive and worried nationalism has its roots in the White Australian's refusal to acknowledge and confront the colonial past (and present) that explain[s] why we have become so ungenerous to the migrant and the refugee.
Hage's argument the white Australian paranoia that resurfaced in response to Paul Keating's promotion of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and greater cultural and economic engagement with 'Asia'. HoweverHage's argument that Keating's advocacy of reconciliation rested on a necessarily Anglo-centric version of historical events. Stephenson says:
Unlike most cultural critics who have praised Keating's Redfern Speech - in which he located the responsibility for the atrocities of colonisation firmly with White Australians - Hage asks us to take a closer look at the implications of such an act, especially in terms of migrant agency in the reconciliation process. It is Keating's usage of the pronoun 'we' in the guise of a national imaginary that Hage finds most objectionable. Decrying what he calls the 'undeconstructed effect of Keating's "we"' (90), Hage shows that Keating ends up reducing the multiplicity of pasts and historical memories to a single White Australian national memory. It is clearly nonsensical to expect Indigenous Australians or more recent migrants to be interpellated by this 'we' .
The very idea of assuming responsibility for colonisation is 'still a coloniser's take on Australia's history, even when it is a repentant coloniser's take' .
in Australia's colonial history Aborigines and Asians have long existed in the Anglo-Celtic imaginary as the two markers of absolute racial 'Otherness' that have both constituted and delimited national identity and membership. It is hardly surprising that White Australians reacted so violently against those racial minorities that have long existed in the White consciousness as posing the greatest threat to white exclusive possession of the nation.
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