New Myths of OZ: The Australian Beach and the Negotiation of National Belonging by Refugee Background Youth

In this article we consider the Australian beach as a material, imaginary and social arena in which different versions of national belonging are performed and contested. Focusing on two short films produced by young people from refugee backgrounds, we explore the negotiation of national belonging on the beach by people who occupy identity categories that are typically excluded from idealising Australian beach mythologies. We argue that both the production and distribution of these films contribute to a reimagining of the Australian beach that creates new opportunities for people from migrant backgrounds to engage in the co-production of Australian identities in their own terms.

National identification and anti-immigrant prejudice: Individual and contextual effects of national definitions

In this study, we examined the relationship between national identification and anti-immigrant prejudice in a multilevel analysis of ISSP survey data from 37,030 individuals in 31 countries. We argue that this relationship depends on how national groups are defined by their members. Across the 31 national samples, the correlation between national identification and prejudice ranged from weakly negative (-.06) to moderately positive (.37). The relationship was significantly stronger in countries where people on average endorsed a definition of national belonging based on language, and weaker where people on average defined the nation in terms of citizenship. These effects occurred at a national rather than individual level, supporting an explanation in terms of the construction of nationality that prevails in a given context. Endorsement of the ancestry-based criteria for nationality was positively associated with prejudice, but only at the individual level.

Female narratives of ‘new’ citizens’ belonging(s) and identities in Europe: case studies from the Netherlands and Britain

Public discourses on citizenship, identity and nationality, which link geographical borders and the political boundaries of a community, are infused with tensions and contradictions. This paper illustrates how these tensions are interwoven with multilayered notions of home, belonging, migration, citizenship and individual’s ‘longing just to be’, focusing on the Dutch and the British context. The narratives of a number of Dutch and British women, who either immigrated to the respective countries or were born to immigrants, illustrate how the growing rigid integration and assimilative discourses in Europe contradict an individual anchoring in national and local communities. The narratives of women participating in these studies show multilayered angles of belonging presenting an alternative to the increasing strong argument for a fixed notion of positioning and national belonging. The female ‘new’ citizens in our study tell stories of individual choices, social mobility and a sense of multiple belonging in and across different communities.

Belgrade vs. Serbia: Spatial re-configurations of belonging

This article explores the relationship between the nation, the city, narratives, and belonging in Serbia through an analysis of narratives of a set of 30 interviews with young Belgrade intellectuals aged 23-35. I argue that what appears to be emerging in post-Milosevic Serbia is a new articulation and a new scale of belonging. Most of my informants are mobilising their city identities, moving from a national to an urban perspective. They imaginatively defend their city identity through a discourse that, others' its newcomers, i.e. the rural residents. However, the article is critical of their articulated dichotomous rhetoric of 'Us, the City Cosmopolitans' vs. I Them, the Rural Nationalists' My overall aim is to offer an analysis of the Serbian case, where one sees that the city of Belgrade has become a microcosm and a symbolic expression for modernity, resistance, openness and democracy. However, instead of seeing urbanity as the only locus of modernity, one needs to understand that urbanity does not one-dimensionally lead to the urbanisation of the mind, implying that once you have cities, or live in a city, there is a specific urban, cosmopolitan experience.

A moral economy of whiteness:behaviours, belonging and Britishness

This article outlines the complex stories through which national belonging is made, and some ways in which class mediates the racialisation process. It is based on fieldwork on the ways in which white UK people in provincial cities construct identities based on positioning vis-a`-vis other groups, communities and the nation. I argue that this relational identity work revolves around fixing a moral-ethical location against which the behaviour and culture of Others is measured, and that this has a temporal and spatial specificity. First, attitudinal trends by social class emerge in our work as being to do with emphasis and life experience rather than constituting absolute distinctions in attitudes. Second, in an era supposedly marked by the hegemony of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ racism, bloodlines and phenotypes are still frequently utilised in race-making discursive work. Third, in provincial urban England, there is a marked ambivalence towards Britishness (as compromised by Others) and an openness to Englishness as a more authentic source of identification.

»The German likes quarrelling.« Conflict and belonging in German diasporic communities around 1900

Discourses of inclusion and exclusion were an integral part of German nation building after 1871. The paper shows that they were not confined to the metropole but were, in fact, reciprocated abroad. Selected instances of conflict within German migrant communities around the world are taken as a springboard to analyze public contestations of (trans-)national belonging. The sources abound with gossip, aggressive bickering, and official complaints to authorities. Contentious issues cover the areas of politics, religion, class, and language. The case studies engage critically with a number of wider issues. First, they question contemporaneous interpretations of an Imperial diaspora as a unified and Heimat-oriented block. Second, on a theoretical level the article argues that internal ruptures are constitutive elements of diaspora construction and should be considered in concomitant theorizations. Third, the case studies highlight the close connection between diaspora and nation building. Fourth, the discourses studied did not only take place within communities, but also between them, as well as with the metropole, all in multi-directional ways. Questions of belonging were discussed around the world with strikingly similar arguments and terminology. Globalization was at work at the discourse level.

Virtual diasporas and the dilemma of multiple belongings in cyberspace

One of the most celebrated qualities of the Internet is its enabling of simultaneity and multiplicity. By allowing users to open as many windows into the world as they (and their computers) can withstand, the Internet is understood to have brought places and cultures together on a scale and in a manner unprecedented. Yet, while the Internet has enabled many to reconnect with cultures and places long distanced and/or lost, it has also led to the belief that these reconnections are established with little correspondent cost to existent ties of belonging. In this paper, I focus on the dilemma multiple belongings engender for the ties of national belonging and question the sanguinity of multiple belongings as practised online. In particular, I use Lefebvre's notion of lived space to unpack the problems and contradictions of what has been called 'Greater China' for the ethnic Chinese minority in nations like Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

White Lines: The Intercultural Politics of Everyday Movement in Local Spaces

This article draws on research into racist vilification experienced by young Arab and Muslim Australians especially since 11 September 2001, to explore the links between public space, movement and national belonging, and the spatial regulation of cultural difference that functions in Australia. The authors analyse the way that the capacity to experience forms of national belonging and cultural citizenship is shaped by inclusion within or exclusion from local as well as nationally significant public spaces. While access to public space and freedom to move are conventionally seen as fundamental to a democratic state, these are often seen in abstract terms. This article emphasises how movement in public space is a very concrete dimension of our experience of freedom, in showing how incivilities directed against Arab and Muslim Australians have operated pedagogically as a spatialised regulation of national belonging. The article concludes by examining how processes associated with the Cronulla riots of December 2005 have retarded the capacities of Muslim and Arab Australians to negotiate within and across spaces, diminishing their opportunities to invest in local and national spaces, shrinking their resources and opportunities for place-making in public space.

Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other

This book examines public worrying over 'ethnic crime' and what it tells us about Australia today. How, for instance, can the blame for a series of brutal group sexual assaults in Sydney be so widely attributed to whole ethnic communities? How is it that the arrival of a foundering boatload of asylum-seekers mostly seeking refuge from despotic regimes in 'the Middle East' can be manipulated to characterise complete cohorts of applicants for refuge 'and their immigrant compatriots' as dangerous, dishonest, criminally inclined and inhuman? How did the airborne terror attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 exacerbate existing tendencies in Australia to stereotype Arabs and Muslims as backward, inassimilable, without respect for Western laws and values, and complicit with barbarism and terrorism? Bin Laden in the Suburbs argues that we are witnessing the emergence of the 'Arab Other' as the pre-eminent 'folk devil' of our time. This Arab Other functions in the national imaginary to prop up the project of national belonging. It has little to do with the lived experiences of Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim Australians, and everything to do with a host of social anxieties which overlap in a series of moral panics. Bin Laden in the Suburbs analyses a decisive moment in the history of multiculturalism in Australia. 'Unlike most migrants, the Arab migrant is a subversive will ... They invade our shores, take over our neighbourhood and rape our women. They are all little bin Ladens and they are everywhere: Explicit bin Ladens and closet bin Ladens; Conscious bin Ladens and unconscious bin Ladens; bin Ladens on the beach and bin Ladens in the suburbs, as this book is aptly titled. Within this register ... even a single Arab is a threat. Contain the Arab or exterminate the Arab? A 'tolerable' presence in the suburbs, or caged in a concentration camp? ... The politics of the Western post-colonial state is constantly and dangerously oscillating between these tendencies today. It is this dangerous oscillation that is so lucidly exposed in this book'.

The promise of Iceland

Memoir, 288 pages. An account of journeys made by the author from Australia to Iceland as a way of interrogating notions of cultural belonging, family, and homecoming. "In 1990, Kári Gíslason travelled to Iceland to meet his father for the first time. What he finds is not what he expected. Born from a secret liaison between a British mother and an Icelandic father, Kári Gíslason was the subject of a promise – a promise elicited from his father to not reveal his identity. The Icelandic city of Reykjavík, where Kári was born, was also home to his father and his father’s wife and five children – none of whom knew of Kári’s existence. Moving regularly between Iceland and Australia, he grew up aware of his father’s identity, but understanding that it was the subject of a secret pact between his parents. At the age of 27, he makes a decision to break the pact and contacts his father’s other family. What follows, and what leads him there, makes for a riveting journey over landscapes, time and memory. Kári travels from the freezing cold winters of Iceland to the shark net at Sydney’s Balmoral, an unsettled life in the English countryside and the harsh yellow summer of Brisbane, and back again. He traces the steps of his mother who answered an ad in The Times for an English-speaking secretary in 1970 and found herself in Iceland among the ‘Army of Foreign Secretaries’, and in the arms of a secret lover. Iceland becomes the substitute for the father Kári never really knew as he discovers the meaning of ‘home’ and closes the circle of his own fatherless life."-- publisher website

Making scenes : Reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali

In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia’s music industry. Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali’s tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked “Balinese-ness” by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self.

Reconfiguring Guangzhou identity – a study of place and locality on Sina Weibo

This thesis investigates the role of Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo in how the people of Guangzhou understand and negotiate their sense of locality. The geo-identity approach used in this thesis opens up a new approach to explore the complex power relationships that structure our society in and through digital media. It finds that although the Chinese government is trying to orchestrate a homogeneous sense of national belonging, Weibo is constantly reinforcing people's awareness of and identification with the local. The findings show that as new communication technologies and practices reconfigure people's daily experience and social lives, they redefine our sense of self and belonging.

Wipert von Blücher und Finnland : Alternativpolitik und Diplomatie im 'Dritten Reich'

This dissertation explores the role of the German minister to Helsinki, Wipert von Blücher (1883-1963), within the German-Finnish relations of the late 1930s and the Second World War. Blücher was a key figure – and certainly one of the constants – within German Finland policy and the complex international diplomacy surrounding Finland. Despite representing Hitler’s Germany, he was not a National Socialist in the narrower sense of the term, but a conservative civil servant in the Wilhelmine tradition of the German foreign service. Along with a significant number of career diplomats, Blücher attempted to restrict National Socialist influence on the exercise of German foreign policy, whilst successfully negotiating a modus vivendi with the new regime. The study of his political biography in the Third Reich hence provides a highly representative example of how the traditional élites of Germany were caught in an cycle of conformity and, albeit tacit, opposition. Above all, however, the biographical study of Blücher and his behaviour offers an hitherto unexplored approach to the history of the German-Finnish relations. His unusually long tenure in Helsinki covered the period leading up to the so-called Winter War, which left Blücher severely distraught by Berlin’s effectively pro-Soviet neutrality and brought him close to resigning his post. It further extended to the German-Finnish rapprochement of 1940/41 and the military cooperation of both countries from mid-1941 to 1944. Throughout, Blücher developed a diverse and ambitious set of policy schemes, largely rooted in the tradition of Wilhelmine foreign policy. In their moderation and commonsensical realism, his designs – indeed his entire conception of foreign policy – clashed with the foreign political and ideological premises of the National Socialist regime. In its theoretical grounding, the analysis of Blücher’s political schemes is built on the concept of alternative policy and indebted to A.J.P. Taylor’s definition of dissent in foreign policy. It furthermore rests upon the assumption, introduced by Wolfgang Michalka, that National Socialist foreign policy was dominated by a plurality of rival conceptions, players, and institutions competing for Hitler’s favour (‘Konzeptionen-Pluralismus’). Although primarily a study in the history of international relations, my research has substantially benefited from more recent developments within cultural history, particularly research on nobility and élites, and the renewed focus on autobiography and conceptions of the self. On an abstract level, the thesis touches upon some of the basic components of German politics, political culture, and foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century: national belonging and conflicting loyalties, self-perception and representation, élites and their management of power, the modern history of German conservatism, the nature and practice of diplomacy, and, finally, the intricate relationship between the ethics of the professional civil service and absolute moral principles. Against this backdrop, the examination of Blücher’s role both within Finnish politics and the foreign policy of the Third Reich highlights the biographical dimension of the German-Finnish relationships, while fathoming the determinants of individual human agency in the process.

Une sociologie du nationalisme vécu en Flandre

nationalisme vécu, Flandre, Belgique, mémoire familiale, appartenance nationale, nation