Towards unsettling the racial nation-state: affective interventions in an Australian literature classroom

ABSTRACT

As the adoption of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (otherwise known as the White Australia policy) reveals, whiteness has always been fundamental to the Australian nation-state. White sovereignty is constitutive of the Australian nation, making it a racial state. But the devastating impact of whiteness on those deemed ‘not-white’ remains largely unacknowledged. Drawing on framing of affective economies and an empirical study tracing how secondary school students in a Literature class negotiate their identities amidst structures of colonialism, I explore the affective dynamics of these negotiations with attention to how emotions align some bodies with particular communities and situate some outside of nation. Within a pedagogic intervention aiming to disrupt canonical assumptions, I collected written responses, recorded group discussions from all class members, and interviewed a selection of these students. Data analysis demonstrates that many in the class were oriented to whiteness as ‘Australianness’ at the expense of other possible cultural identities offered by their biographies, often resulting in emotions of shame or disorientation. It invites us to think beyond national borders to avert the deleterious effects ‘nation-ness’ can have on those it excludes and to work towards implementing pedagogic interventions that might unsettle the racial nation-state.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial state
• nation
• whiteness
• affective economies
• pedagogy
• schooling
• race

non-white non-Indigenous Australians are also more likely [than white Australians] to have experienced the violence that is concealed by the ideal of civility … and which is of course directed to some bodies rather than others. (Ahmed, 2005, p. 78)

Within the context of the wrongs Indigenous Australians suffered at the hands of white Australians, Ahmed (2005) demonstrates how histories of violence can be concealed under cloaks of civility. The strong tendency to take cover and bury past wrongs hinders the nation’s ability to move past historical injustices. It also perpetuates the violence of erasure and extends this to others who identify as non-white, non-Indigenous Australians. This latter group is ever-increasing. In 2022–23 three of the top five countries of birth for migrant arrivals were India, China and the Philippines (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023). In the 2016 census, six of the top 10 countries of birth of Australian immigrants were Asian countries. The proportion of people of Asian backgrounds in Australia has increased from 5% in 2001 to over 17% in 2017 and many Australians feel that elevated migration from Asia tests Australia, which is still dominated by European traditions, despite its closeness to Asia (Soong, 2018). The domination of Australian selective schools by Asian-Australian students is one example of such racial tension as Asian success is represented in the Sydney print media as problematic for the imagined white nation (Ho, 2017). Proctor and Sriprakash argue that this tension seems to result from a sense of the ‘threat such success makes to historical relations of white privilege’ (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2017, p. 2379). Another significant example of racist discourse in contemporary Australian media is that associated with the ‘African gangs narrative’ (Majavu, 2020, Pittaway & Dantas, 2021, Weng & Mansouri, 2021). Majavu argues that ‘the long-standing racist trope of synonymizing Blackness with criminality is widespread in Australia’ (p. 28) and the Minister for Home Affairs in 2017, Peter Dutton, asserted falsely during the 2017 holiday season in Melbourne when restaurants were full of diners that the community of Melbourne were ‘scared to go out to restaurants’ because of African gangs (p.32). Racialised rhetoric has testified to Australian anxiety regarding cultural and religious others since the gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth Century (Weng & Mansouri, 2021) and successive waves of migrants Vietnamese, Italian, Greek and others, have experienced parallel suspicions and othering. As Weng and Mansouri put it, ‘[c]onstructed against a Eurocentric majority, mistrust towards the ethnic and religious other, emerged especially through news media representations and political discursive repertoires and have continued in present-day Australia’ (p. 469). In these ways, among others, Australian political, legal and media institutions maintain the nation-state as a racial state.

Benedict Anderson (2006) explicates the concept of the nation-state through its evolution from cultural groupings based on common histories that reach back into cultural memories to elephantine dynastic states that ‘stretch the short tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’ (p.86). As the evolving nation-states brought together often disparate peoples, they super-imposed political structures designed to serve the interests of the rulers rather than do justice to the diverse cultural traditions now yanked together within artificially constructed borders. What makes such states racial is the persistence of racial hierarchies in which one group remains dominant. In Australia, for instance, settler colonists constructed a racial nation-state based on white exclusions. While racial categories change over time, Whites remain dominant and who is White is continually contested. According to Goldberg (2002), ‘States are racial … because of the structural position they occupy in producing and reproducing, constituting and effecting racially shaped … accesses and restrictions … They are racial, in short, in virtue of their modes of population definition, determination, and structuration’ (p. 104).

Within this context, this paper reports on one part of a larger 3-year research project in which I as white teacher-researcher explored the pedagogic possibilities of diasporic texts within an Australian secondary school Literature classroom. There were 20 students in the class − 16 with backgrounds from the many Asias and four with white Anglo backgrounds. A pedagogic intervention was introduced through the medium of a diasporic text and the purpose of the study was to explore possibilities for literary pedagogies that would broaden beyond the Anglo-canon, with texts that included the bodies and cultural experiences of my students. As I taught the class, intertwining the students’ stories and the diasporic novel The Hamilton Case (de Kretser, 2003), the students showed me my own whiteness and the political power of whiteness, despite its (to me at that time) seeming benevolence. Thus, I came to write this paper, exploring how to combine the search for inclusive pedagogic possibilities and the strategies to counter whiteness as a hegemonic force. In this article, I draw on only one small group of five students as they serve my current twin purpose of demonstrating possibilities and illustrating the impact of whiteness. Morse (2000) argues that the more useful data are collected from each person, the fewer participants are needed. She encourages researchers to consider the scope of study and the complexity and accessibility of the topic. My first data excerpt demonstrates the experiences of othering that students perceived as ‘non-white’ endure. The second data excerpt shows the pedagogic possibilities of foregrounding students’ stories as part of literary pedagogy and the affective shifts afforded by such a change.

A significant component of the literary pedagogy employed in the class emphasises the backstory to current Australian attitudes and practices and I will begin by introducing three aspects of Australian history (terra nullius,¹ White Australia Policy and the ‘great Australian silence’) and suggest how they play into the affective economy of the racial state within Australia. As I do so, I do not wish to conflate the experiences of Indigenous Australians and recent migrants, but rather to demonstrate that the circulating flows of emotion and discourses in Australian politics and media are experienced by all who enter Australian shores and the racist discourses that have persisted since white settlement have gained power and force through repetition over time underpinning contemporary responses to immigrants to Australia.

2023 was an important year in the Australian national calendar. A referendum was held asking Australians to amend the national constitution, to grant a right for indigenous Australians to be consulted about decisions that affect their lives (Langton, 2023). As the referendum approached, right wing discourses circulated ‘within affective economies of white nationalism to obscure the histories and ongoing consequences of colonialism’ (Ridgeway, 2020, p. 9). They claimed constitutional change would be divisive, inappropriate and would attribute guilt to present generations for past actions (Langton, 2023).

White defensiveness and avoidance of guilt have characterised public discourse about the realities of institutionalised racism. Noel Pearson, respected Guugu Yimithirr lawyer, academic and community leader, argues that fear of repudiation lies at the heart of the nation’s trouble with indigenous Australians (Pearson, 2022). If white settler colonists had taken the opportunity to recognise the indigenous voice, he argued, then would not that be a repudiation of who they were and their place in the country of Australia? Having repudiated indigenous peoples, white Australia as represented by the settler colonial government is afraid that it in turn will be repudiated. As Goenpul scholar Moreton-Robinson (2004, p. 2) puts it: ‘patriarchal white sovereignty is a regime of power that derives from the illegal act of possession’. This fear born of an illegitimate assumption of sovereignty leads to defensiveness, anger and insistent assertion of white power. The self-protectiveness of white affect² is further analysed by Bucholtz (2019) as requiring ‘regular fortification in the face of historically emergent racial formations that undermine its dominance: although “empowering affect” perpetuates privilege, such privilege has to be continuously reinvented’ (p. 488).

In the light of these considerations, and building on the work of Altman (2020), Berg, von Scheve, Ural and Walter-Jochum (2019), Bleiker and Hutchison (2018), Gustafsson and Hall (2021), Hage (2003), Johnston-Levy (2023) and Kivimäki, Suodenjoki and Vahtikari (2021), my purpose is to examine the role of emotions in constituting the racial nation-state of Australia and to consider possible pedagogic interventions that might unsettle the hegemonic power of whiteness within this context. I add to this field of inquiry the account of a specific pedagogic intervention within a particular literature classroom in a contemporary Australian political context. I begin by considering the affective power of the racial state within Australia, presenting a brief history of the inception of Australia as a settler colonial state. I then present the theoretical framework underpinned by Ahmed’s (2004a, 2004b) theory of affective economies. This will consist of two stages: I explicate the concepts of stickiness and orientation and then consider the contested term ‘affective nationalism’. I introduce two data excerpts drawn from the classroom context and analyse them with reference to white ignorance and ‘Australian-ness’. Drawing insights from these analyses, I conclude by considering pedagogic possibilities of unsettling the racial nation-state.

The Australian Context: a story of racial affects

The exclusions at the heart of the Australian nation-state began prior to its actual history. In 1770, Captain James Cook ignored his instructions from the Royal Society which stated, ‘No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 112). Cook chose to invade and occupy Australia in the name of King George III of Britain without the consent of, or treaty with, the ‘natives’. He did this because he did not see them claiming ownership of the land in the appropriative ways he recognised. He had no understanding of the deeply relational way indigenous Australians were ontologically connected to country. Thus, Australia’s Indigenous people are homeless and out of place because the legal fiction of terra nullius still positions them as trespassers (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 18).

While the doctrine of terra nullius supported ideologies of White superiority and privilege that drove Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people, The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (The White Australia Policy) was directed against non-European immigrants. These two prongs of the racial nation-state were designed on the one hand to justify the theft of land and the decimation of first peoples, and on the other to safeguard the possession and keep it in white hands. As British colonialism operated by taking possession of other peoples’ lands and resources to benefit the Empire, the nation was founded illegitimately and is therefore beset by fears of loss and the continuing need to reassert power. The long history of European domination has left Australians with racialized distributions of economic, political, and cultural power (Maiese, 2022), and Moreton-Robinson (2015) demonstrates how the colonial process continues today through the refusal of Indigenous sovereignty and the overregulation of indigenous lives. Her term ‘possessive logics’ denotes ‘a mode of rationalization … that is underpinned by an excessive desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation-state’s ownership, control, and domination’ (p. xii). It was this intense desire to possess intertwined with fear of the loss of possession that were the affective forces that, in 1901, led the founding white men creating Australia’s federation, to pass the White Australia Policy (p. xiii).

A nation built on stolen land yearns to feel at home. Indeed, as Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard (2022) put it, ‘the rage and fear expressed when whiteness is questioned demonstrates the anxiety and discomfort that is part of the ongoing desire for white possession and homeliness’ (p.81). The White Australia Policy served this anxiety until 1973 when it was replaced with the policy of ‘happy multiculturalism’ (Ahmed, 2013), a policy which has not managed to quell the underlying fear of repudiation with its attendant emotions of hate and defensiveness. These emotions circulate within the affective economy of the racial nation-state and align individuals with and against others, a process of alignment that shapes the very surface of collectives (Ahmed, 2004b).

The originary act of dispossession was buried under the great Australian silence, ‘a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’ (Pearson, 2022, Stanner, 2011). This installed white ignorance as a ‘systematically supported and socially induced pattern of (mis)understanding the world that functions to sustain systemic oppression, white privilege and white supremacy’ (Applebaum, 2008, p. 296). Thus, white ignorance protects white people from facing the truth that they are benefitting from a system that perpetrates racial harm to both original inhabitants of the land and those people of colour³ who have chosen to migrate to Australia over subsequent years. These migrant groups experience othering in subtle and unsubtle ways and are often subject to vitriolic attacks by politicians such as Pauline Hanson.⁴ While it is 50 years since the abolition of the official White Australia Policy, whiteness is still valorised as the norm against which indigenous Australians and non-white immigrants are judged. Thus, the exclusions that began in 1770 persist today.

So it is not surprising that the data generated by my students whose backgrounds are predominantly from the many Asias reflect the colonially inflected social structures and their attendant exclusions. They and their families enter a national history which carries a heavy emotional burden of settler fear and defensiveness which ‘destabilizes a settler’s sense of self through the recognition of unearned advantage over and systemic harm done to Indigenous people’ (Kizuk, 2020, p. 162). This defensiveness, I maintain, extends to suspicion of all people of colour, people who might embody possible alternatives to white sovereignty and therefore represent a threat to a racial state based on an illegitimate assumption of power. Therefore, just under the surface of the ‘happy’ multicultural nation-state of Australia, powerful emotions circulate and stick to differently marked bodies to different degrees.

The affective economy of whiteness

The affective economy – the circulation of energy and emotions across and between bodies – is a useful theoretical tool as we consider positive and negative attachments to the nation. There is a vast and continuing literature concerning Ahmed’s work on this concept (Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Hållander, 2020; Moldenhawer, 2022; Peeren, 2019; Ural, 2017; Yam, 2016; Zembylas, 2022; to name just a few recent publications). Many of these focus on the work emotions do and how they move between the individual and the collective, how national forces and emotions work. Recent literature is divided between those texts that interrogate the role of white affects (Bucholtz, 2019) and those that emphasise the emotions of those othered ‘amidst the material violences that are being enacted daily on people of color as a result of racist policies and practices’ (Zembylas, 2022, p. 636).⁵ These sets of emotions are circulating within affective economies of ‘ongoing settler colonial land dispossession, white supremacy and racial capitalism’ (Zembylas, 2022, p. 636).

Ahmed frames this concept from the perspective of cultural politics and invites us to investigate how the movement of emotions connects some bodies to the nation but relegates others to the status of outsiders. She emphasises the histories that precede emotions and ‘how the subject arrives into a world that already has affects and feelings circulating in very particular ways’ (Schmitz & Ahmed, 2014). As she asks, why the circulation of emotions does its work by producing ‘a differentiation between “us” and “them”’, she shows that emotions are not private but ‘public and social, they work in conjunction with material and discursive processes, and they are both racialized and racializing’ (Bucholtz, 2019, p. 489). As affective economies work to mediate the relationship between the individual and the collective (Ahmed, 2004a), the emotional flow works through repeated signs that generate emotions and circulate them amongst bodies. Thus, the emotion of hate moves between people within a community as it is pushed by hate speech to designate some figures as ‘other’. In Australia, the national affective economy of ‘settler colonial anxiety of territorial and racial vulnerability’ (Indelicato, 2018, p. 25) creates emotional flows that stick to individuals to either enhance or diminish their possibilities of belonging. In this way, dominant discourses circulate feelings of white entitlement and superiority and construct others within a racial category of ‘people of colour’ (Leonardo, 2009). Within this affective economy of racial discrimination, Ahmed (2004c) analyses ‘stickiness’ of affective encounters between subjects and objects creating attachments that are social, cultural and political.

She demonstrates the strong first impression on a body of a racist sign. The powerful example of Fanon as a child inspiring fear in a white child because he was black shows how the circulating fear impresses itself on the skin and outcasts him from a white society he is too young to understand. Repeated experiences of racist language ‘allow the sign to accumulate value’ (Ahmed, 2004c, p. 92) and stick to the body. That stickiness determines how bodies are viewed within the context of the nation. Ahmed’s (2004c) substantive concern is with racialised and racist emotions circulating through individual and collective bodies and she asks how certain kinds of things are given value over time. In her theory, the affective economy involves the circulation of signs, ideas, emotions and objects so that they gain affective value through the repetition of affective practices. That is, emotions are produced relationally as an effect of their circulation in social and/or institutional settings. For instance, racist taunts amplified by repeated instances generate a sense in the receiver of being alien. Gradually they come to see their own body as ugly or inferior. Ahmed says the racist label is sticking to their body and this stickiness makes it hard to divest. It begins to orient them away from certain communities and towards others as their history of being derided affects their future attachments. Thus, orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, ‘of how we inhabit spaces as well as who or what we inhabit spaces with’ (Ahmed, 2006, p. 1) and stickiness and orientation are constitutive aspects of affective economies.

Indeed, stickiness relates to an object’s orientation, for ‘negative’ emotions are linked to objects that are distanced from the body, whereas ‘positive’ objects arouse desires for a closer proximity – as if to touch it (Applebaum, 2010, p. 32). Thus, for Ahmed, stickiness and orientation are entangled as attachments are formed according to orientations towards or away from particular objects. Affect’s sticky character maintains connections between bodies (both human and non-human) which in turn set up common orientations towards objects. These considerations are significant when we work towards unsettling white dominance. As Mulcahy (2016) puts it, ‘[t]he model of affect as stickiness makes affect crucial to the struggle against injustice. Here, affect is not taken to be the ground for action such as challenging an injustice, but as performative’ (p. 208). As repetitions of racial signs do violence to bodies, it is through repeating different signs and relating to bodies differently that we will make a shift in affective relations and work towards combatting exclusive social norms. Of course, the concept of ‘nation’ means different things to different people. From a socio-cultural affective perspective, the racial nation-state is constantly being made and remade through the everyday affective practices and circulating emotions of diverse community groups within it. The mobility and dynamism of the nation opens possibilities of collective shifts as well as individual ones and thus affect is profoundly pedagogical.

Affective nationalism

While emotions circulate and stick to individual bodies through repetition of signs or language, the affective economy of the nation is dynamically constituted by the accumulation of circulating signs across its diverse communal groups. As Ahmed (2004c) analyses the performative speech-act of a national apology as a form of nation-building, she argues that acknowledgement of wrongdoing can bring the nation ‘into existence as a felt community’ (p.101). Affective nationalism can be constructed, for instance, through the economies of shame as an experience of national belonging is created. Militz and Schurr (2016), as they analyse ‘affective nationalism’ ask how materially produced national representations affect different bodies and they ascribe three stages to this process:

First, national sentiments arise through a specific assortment of elements that stimulate the emergence of certain feelings and practices. Second, through this assortment of elements, different bodily histories become relevant in moments of affection and enable feelings of proximity and distance. Lastly, this embodied becoming of national meaning connects different bodies with multiple capacities to affect and be affected through sentiments of belonging and alienation. (p.55–56)

Nationalism is thus constituted by ‘entangled histories of experiences and emotions’ (Kivimäki, Suodenjoki & Vahtikari, 2021, p. 6), which are oriented around some bodies more than others. In Australia, national sentiments have arisen based on assumptions of white superiority, practices of exclusion of indigenous peoples and people of colour, and fear of loss of possession. Different bodily histories within this short history of the Australian nation have moved some together within the imagined community of ‘nation’ and have marginalised others. Thus, within the Australian nation-state, there are contradictory emotions and attachments moving and changing within the fluctuating rhythms of political fortunes and migration histories but always containing traces of the defining racist history of the settler colonial state. While some find the term, ‘affective nationalism’ too totalising (Stephens, 2020, p. 10) to explain diverse responses to events, with Tolia-Kelly (2020), I understand the concept as including affective circulations that are mobile and able to incorporate the ‘economies of multicultural intimacies and racial politics’ (p. 11). Militz and Schurr (2016) put it this way: ‘Affective nationalism sees nationalism as an everyday experience, including as well as excluding differently marked bodies to different extents into or from a national community in moments of affective encounters through embodying, sharing, enjoying or detesting what feels national’ (p.61). It is the bodies who do not feel they belong that form the interest of this paper. Who does nationalism serve? What bodies are excluded or included and how might one intervene in these processes of exclusion?

Towards decolonial pedagogic intervention

Drawing from a larger qualitative project that involved a pedagogical intervention, this paper emerges from a literature unit taught in an all-girls secondary school in Australia. The class consisted of 20 students, with backgrounds predominantly from the many Asias and the unit of work lasted for 10 weeks beginning with some postcolonial theory, and consisting of a deliberate blend of close analysis of the set novel and student sharing of their own diasporic histories. The pedagogy deliberately foregrounded the students’ own stories and gave them the same status as the set written text. Thus, the oral texts and the novel were put into a pedagogical conversation in order to do the work of recognising the submerged histories that circulate in the room contributing to its affective economy.

Ethics approval was granted by the university ethics committee⁶ and the students were asked to submit a piece of writing prior to the unit and another at the end of the unit so that a comparison could be made about any attitude or identity shifts that might have been made. On two occasions, the class was divided into small groups and their discussions were audio-recorded. The data excerpts analysed in this paper were taken from those transcripts. At the end of the unit, I, as white teacher-researcher, interviewed a purposive selection (Ames et al. 2019) of 10 students, chosen to represent a range of responses from significant attitude change to no change at all. A method of postcolonial discourse analysis (Usher & Edwards, 1994) was employed to derive insights concerning the impact of national norms and colonial discourses on students’ emotions and this was supplemented by use of Gilligan and Eddy’s (2021) listening guide which resists the binary logics of positivistic research and foregrounds the emotions of the participants and the relationality of the pedagogic process.

The set text was the diasporic novel The Hamilton Case (de Kretser, 2003) which constituted an interruption to the mainstream canonical literature texts in the rest of the year. Being set in Asia, it presented a different perspective to the ethno-national values and the Euro-centred textual focus usually expected in Australian literature classrooms. The protagonist of the text, Sam, as an example of mental colonisation in British Ceylon modelled self-alienation and emotional distance from his fellow Sri Lankans including his own family. Having adopted British values and ways of talking and thinking, he was emblematic of the imposed identities of colonial subjects and through him, negative consequences of colonial indoctrination were exposed. The hope was that, by reflecting on Sam’s experience, the students might further learn to recognise the mechanisms by which colonial structures imposed hierarchies and imperialist norms within everyday schooling and circulated emotions of either belonging or estrangement.

This research, therefore, adds to existing literature on the role of emotions within the nation-state by foregrounding the voices of young first- or second-generation immigrants and exposing the negative emotions generated in them by being excluded from normative conceptions of ‘Australian-ness’.

White ignorance and emotions of loss

In this section, I will discuss two data excerpts⁷ – both drawn from a small group discussion within my literature classroom towards the end of the unit on The Hamilton Case. While I handed out a set of questions on identity in relation to the novel to guide the discussion, the group whose responses I present here ignored my handout and decided to share their own identity stories. In the group, there were five students, three of Indian heritage – Anna, Chala and Carol – Katie (Sri Lankan heritage), and Georgia (Hong Kong). The first excerpt from their discussion concerns the emotional effects on them of the racial state. The second presents an example of a student-directed pedagogic intervention which demonstrates possibilities for unsettling the impact of the racial state on the bodies of those excluded from it.

Data excerpt 1

Anna: I feel really bad that we’ve missed out on the Indian, for me, the Indian side of our culture because there’s a lot to it. I feel like going into the western culture I was kind of suppressed -

Georgia: Lost.

Anna: I lost a lot of elements of Indian culture but the western people might see it as very -

Katie: Integration kind of.

Carol: Moving forward or whatever.

Anna: That’s not my point. I was saying western people might see Indian culture as different and not very enhanced as them but the thing is there’s a lot of elements to Indian culture which they aren’t exposed to. There’s something quite special and precious about the culture and they don’t know anything about that…

Chala: You know how people stereotype – not stereotype like when they think of India they think they don’t want to go there it’s sort of third world and they don’t see why I would like to go there but I love going there. Whenever we go there it’s like -

Anna: Yes and then the primary school I went to was a local state school somewhere. I remember an incident that happened; this is the first three weeks of me in Australia, and the girl sitting next to me she was trying to ask me, ‘In India did you guys live in huts and stuff? Is this your first time living in a house’?

Georgia: Oh my god that’s horrible.

Anna: I’m like, ‘Wow this is your perception of India?’ this is when I was in Year 2 and I’m like, ‘Wow’.

Chala: That goes onto showing the western ignorance toward India. There are so many elements of India. My version of India is so different to her version of India and also class influences everything.

Georgia: Are there class differences?

Anna: No but this girl it’s not like she came from a random as family who were drug addicts and stuff. Both of her parents were university lecturers so she’s coming from a highly educated family and this is the question that she was trying to ask me. I was dumbfounded I’m just like, ‘I don’t know what to say to you? What do you want me to tell you?’… those people they live in big mansions and own half of Mumbai. If western people could associate with those people they would realise how advanced India actually is but they just stereotype India to thinking, ‘The slums of India’ actually only a small part of India is slums.

These girls have arrived into a world where there are already powerful emotions circulating and this circulation produces a differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The first emotions they express are those of loss. ‘Going into western culture’ involves suppression, a diminishing of their senses of self. The repetition of ‘lost’ together with ‘missed out’ conveys emotional pain which Anna attributes to western ignorance: ‘there’s a lot of elements to Indian culture which they weren’t exposed to’. Sullivan and Tuana (2007) argue that ‘in the case of racial oppression, a lack of knowledge or an unlearning of something previously known often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation’ (p. 1). As I have already indicated, the ‘great Australian silence’ around race has been a subject of Australian scholarly analysis for decades (Stanner, 2011, Reynolds, 1984, Bacalja, 2020). The resulting ignorance of non-white cultures has resulted in practices that reinforce white privilege and contribute to affective economies that are built around white bodies. Within a climate of denial and defensiveness, white superiority is continually asserted moving some bodies closer to each other and distancing others. Whiteness involves hierarchies and over time, the affective economies of whiteness have circulated widely establishing entrenched patterns of belonging and alienation (Militz and Schurr, 2016, p. 16).

Anna gives a particularly poignant example of how white ignorance works when she presents her experience in primary school: ‘In India, did you guys live in huts and stuff?’ Said by a small child, this question reflects circulating assumptions. While othering Anna, it also belittles her, implying her culture is primitive and inferior. This sense of being inferior seems to stick to her body and her defensiveness of India throughout the selected excerpt shows that 10 years later, this memory still rankles. The sense that India is viewed by ‘western people’ as ‘not very enhanced’ indicates the collective nature of emotions of white superiority as the affective economy of whiteness impinges on the students’ sense of their own identity and moves them away not only from mainstream Australian society but also from their senses of self. Thus, as they invoke national binaries – ‘Indian side’, ‘western culture’, they do so in terms of a hierarchy against which they feel the need to defend their heritages. Carol’s observation that their entry into western culture might be viewed as ‘moving forward or whatever’ suggests that dominant discourses circulate emotions of inferiority that are sticking to their bodies. Emotions in this setting are not located in individual subjects, but operate as sites of power and resistance moving either toward or away from whiteness as Australian-ness.

Data excerpt 2

Anna: I hate the question where do you come from.

Georgia: So do I.

Anna: I’m like, ‘what do you mean by where do you come from? Where I was born or where I’ve lived most of my childhood or where I was – ‘

Georgia: I culturally feel like I’m Indian.

Anna: Yes, ‘− or where I’ve done most of my primary education because then that would be Mauritius. Where were you born? India. Where I’ve done most of my primary education? Mauritius. Where I’ve learned English and stuff? That’s the Gold Coast. Where I live currently? That’s Melbourne so what do you want me to tell you? What do you mean where am I from? That doesn’t make sense?

Chala: I’ve got a question for you guys. When you’re surrounded by only white people – that’s racist but -

Georgia: No that’s me in primary school.

Chala: - the thing is at Atwood High school you’ve got to say I’m surrounded by a lot of Indians and Sri Lankans and also Asians, Australians. A lot of people from our origin but what our family ancestry is so it’s not like we’re surrounded by western people but when you go -

Georgia: I’ve forgotten to type.

Chala: They’re all first generation – most of them are first generation as well.

Anna: Most of us are first or second generation we’re not -

Georgia: We can all relate to each other. I love this!

Chala: Yes.

Anna: - we’re not fifth generation Australian so when you’re surrounded by fifth generation Australians do you feel Australian? That’s the question.

Chala: I don’t feel Australian.

Anna: I feel out of place.

Katie: I feel really awkward but I am just socially awkward anyway.

Georgia: No you’re not.

Against the implicitly alienating essentialisms of the question, ‘where do you come from?’ Anna asserts her many ‘routes not roots’ (Hall, 1997) to her current identity. The three rhetorical questions at the end of her outline of her journey express emotions of irritation and defiance. She resists and resents being stereotyped by white Australians and is able to safely express those emotions in the small safe space these girls are constructing for each other. While in significant ways the dominant norms in the school and classroom are engendered by the wider affective economy in which they are situated, pedagogic interventions can interrupt these norms offering small but potentially transformative possibilities. As Nxumalo and Villanueva (2019) argue, ‘[i]t is … important not to dismiss the ways in which small shifts towards relational practices matter for livability and hope within increasingly unlivable worlds’ (p. 46). Against an alienating wider affective economy, the students are building their own localised affective economy where the emotions circulating are empathetic and resistant to racial othering. They assert their wider transnational experiences against the dominant national myopia. Rather than being ‘surrounded by only white people’ and subject only to the dictates of the racial nation-state, in their conversation, they are expanding the borders of the classroom and establishing a space where their bodies are not questioned, dismissed or belittled. Georgia emphasises the importance of this emotion of belonging when she exclaims, ‘We can all relate to each other. I love this!’

From within the safety of this inclusive space, ‘the pedagogical moment becomes one of affective irruption rather than a transference of static knowledge from teacher to learner’ (Riddle & Hickey, 2022, p. 4). The space releases new relational possibilities so that the students can articulate their emotions of alienation freely – ‘I don’t feel Australian’. ‘I feel out of place’. ‘I feel awkward’ – without paying a social penalty. As Georgia ends the excerpt by affirming Katie, ‘No you’re not’, she underlines the importance of this mutually supportive space and shows the pedagogic value of sharing stories and emotions. Stories are performative in this setting. They, and the emotions they express or generate, do things. They broaden the world of the classroom and open possibilities for a shift in attitudes towards dominant ideas like the necessity to assimilate, or feeling differently about oneself or one’s body. As Hemmings powerfully puts it:

Feeling that something is amiss in how one is recognised, feeling an ill fit with social descriptions, feeling undervalued, feeling that same sense in considering others; all these feelings can produce a politicised impetus to change that foregrounds the relationship between ontology and epistemology precisely because of the experience of their dissonance. (Hemmings, 2012, p. 150)

It is what happens dynamically between the girls and between them and the text that matters in this space. What they are learning impacts on their embodied being and has the potential to shift their sense of their place in the world.

While within the fraught history of the racial nation-state, negative emotions circulate concerning non-white bodies, othering them and stopping their free movement within society, the students are moving the pedagogy towards addressing the ‘push-and-pull of feelings that live in [their] bodies (Ehret & Leander, 2019, p. 1). Thus, the teacher’s role is not merely to transmit prescribed knowledge but to facilitate the creation of space for dialogue and negotiation as diverse stories intertwine and each student’s history in relation to the nation becomes part of the shared classroom knowledge. Building a space where their bodies belong resists the othering that results from ethno-nationalist norms. It demonstrates pedagogic possibilities for unsettling the hegemonic power of those norms and discourses in small ways in everyday classrooms.

Within high-stakes testing environments and amidst the colonially inflected standardised curricula in the majority of Australian schools, student orientations to the course, the class and the text are not usually brought into consideration. Courses are typically text-centred and literature texts are typically chosen based on canonical status, quality of the writing or thematic significance for the course designers. Selecting texts that include the bodies that are in the room, that engage students in their own lived identity struggles can challenge narrow traditional understandings of Literature classrooms as spaces for participating in a literary canon that is typically understood as exemplifying an Anglicised sense of national identity (Truman, 2019). The choice of The Hamilton Case as text does the work of speaking to the students’ own diasporic histories and exposing the psychic violence (Fanon, 1961) of colonialism in ways they were not able to recognise in their own experience. In the context of this emotional work done by the text as affective agent, the pedagogy can foreground orientation placing focus on student histories, stories and emotions. ‘This means explicitly recognizing that the ways in which human and more-than-human bodies affectively become oriented to each other as well as to other things, ideas, and social formations, has consequence. These orientations can shift and change direction’ (Nxumalo &Villanueva, 2019, p. 46). This re-orientation operates to pull their bodies into the space and towards the formation of an affective community. As they work through the emotions and bodily responses that constitute their racialized subjectivities, they reduce the power of the discourses of privilege circulating in the room and begin to gain access to ‘difficult knowledges’ (Gachago et al., 2018, p. 231) such as the legacy of the White Australia Policy. These knowledges allow them to see that they often subscribe to hegemonic values that are not in their best interests.

When students of colour first arrive in an Australian school, they cannot see the implications for them of the emotional legacy of the White Australia Policy which is circulating in its many aspects. Because they do not see this emotional history and its attendant emotions of fear, hatred, defensiveness and anger, they experience their otherness as personal failure. Many students in the class express this sense of failure and it is evident in the three student quotes above. Because they blame themselves, they often try to twist themselves out of shape in order to ‘feel Australian’. Local experiences of belonging constructed through the performative power of shared stories, the freeing effects of learning the histories behind the present and the creation of space for student-directed learning can offset some of the deleterious affects of the Australian affective economy of whiteness and unsettle the power of the racial nation-state in their lives.

Conclusion

As nation-states are dynamic and always in flux, as they are constituted by the lived daily histories of those who dwell within them, acknowledging the long histories by which they have come to exist takes the pressure off individuals to succeed or fail as ‘Australians’. Classroom time spent unpacking this history sets a freeing context exposing the ways dominant values do not work in the students’ best interests. This helps to offset feelings of shame which result from failure to fit in. Pedagogies that reorient the students towards each other can intervene in the racializing processes and offer students ways to unstick racial slurs and slogans from their bodies. Reorienting the classroom space so that it is built around diverse bodies and allowing the students to direct the flow of discussion and the energies and emotions in the room frees up the pedagogy enabling the emergence of new possibilities of relationship.

The limitations of this paper are that it foregrounds only one small class of students and in fact only part of the data generated within the larger project from which it emerges. It focuses on only five students (of a class of 20) who were selected to point towards the pedagogic possibilities of the project. Of the 20 students, there were only three white students, and these have been ignored in this paper not in order to hide them but because they were not essential to the purpose of demonstrating pedagogical possibilities of unsettling the power of the racial nation-state in the lives and identities of students deemed non-white. Further pedagogic strategies such as white complicity pedagogy (Applebaum, 2010) might be helpful to develop a more comprehensive sense of moral responsibility in future iterations of this course. This would invite these students not to discount the ways in which they were reproducing whiteness, but to ‘do whiteness differently’ (Warren, 2001, p. 465).

This paper has been deliberately confined to the Australian context. It does, however, have implications for any affective economy circulating discourses and emotions of white nationalism. Other national contexts have and are being researched by others (Eriksen, 2022, Leonardo, 2013, Taylor, 2022) and there is an opening for a stronger emphasis on student voice in future research across national boundaries.

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Notes on contributors

Mary Purcell

Mary Purcell is a sessional academic in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her research investigates postcolonial pedagogies and constructions of race in contemporary Australian contexts.

Notes

1. Terra nullius meaning land belonging to no one was the legal concept used by the British to justify settlement in Australia.

2. In this paper, while foregrounding the word, ‘emotion’, I use the terms affect, emotion and feeling interchangeably (see Schmitz and Ahmed, 2014). Ahmed explains that she focuses on the word, ‘emotion’ rather than affect because of the movement that is explicit in its etymology. She likes the idea of exploring the possibilities of a word used in everyday life and she is concerned to disrupt the idea of emotion coming from within and then moving out towards objects and others. I follow Zembylas (2022) who blurs the boundaries between these words, backgrounding current debates around them in order to focus on the political implications of the work they do.

3. While ‘people of colour’ is historically an American term, recent scholars of racial literacy in Australia are currently employing the term (Bargallie et al. 2023).

4. Pauline Hanson is an Australian senator who founded and leads the right-wing ultra-nationalist party, ‘One Nation’. Kurt Sengal (2020) said of her: ‘Hanson has benefited from – and helped to shape – the normalisation of racism and xenophobia in Australia’.

5. Some examples of writers foregrounding the emotions of those othered by white supremacy are: (Dernikos, 2020, Lee, Falter & Schoonover, 2021, Pedwell, 2016, Zambelli, 2020).

6. Ethics ID: 1543662 (anon) University Humanities and Applied Sciences Human Ethics Sub-Committee.

7. The data excerpts in this paper were developed as part of a longer project exploring pedagogical possibilities of diasporic texts in an Australian literature classroom (Purcell, 2020).