Thinking 'postnationally' : dialogue across multicultural, indigenous, and settler spaces

This article uses the internationality implied by the project of nation building in Australia to suggest ways of rethinking the dualism of minority/ majority in popular, policy, and academic discourse on multicultural states. My starting point is to identify lines of continuity across the experiences of three conventionally delimited social categories: first, those who collectively claim the status of “settler,” “host,” or charter group”; second, those who typically get figured as immigrants or “migrants”—in Australia, the non-Anglo “ethnics” who are never quite Australian; and third, indigenous people. Opening conversation across the domains of settler, migrant, and indigenous difference in ex-colonial settings like Australia is especially timely in the context of institutional and epistemological barriers that close it down. There are the persistently discrete spheres of academic endeavour called “Ethnic and Racial Studies,” on the one hand, and “Indigenous Studies,” on the other, which in their intellectual and policy separation, continue to inscribe the minority status of those who do not quite fit some (always presumed) norm. This norm, meanwhile, has attracted its own knowledge domain (of “whiteness studies”) only recently, so assured has been its unspoken and unacknowledged claim to naturalness (e.g., Frankenburg 1997; Hage 1998; Schech and Haggis 1998).