Convivial multiculture and the perplication of race: the dynamics of becoming African Australian Kirk Ndabaningi Zwangobani A thesis submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National University March, 2016 i © 2016 K.N.Zwangobani All rights reserved This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission of the author ii DECLARATION This is to certify that the writing that follows is all my own work, except where acknowledged as the words or ideas of other scholars, and has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution. Signed. Kirk Ndabaningi Zwangobani March 2016 iii ABSTRACT 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 1 INTRODUCTION 3 1.1 ARE WE A PRIORI AFRICAN AUSTRALIAN? 3 1.2 THE PERPLICATION OF RACE 7 1.3 TRAJECTORY STATEMENT 10 2 AFRICANS IN AUSTRALIA 15 2.1 TOWARDS AN AFRICAN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY 16 2.2 AFRICANS AS… ? 22 2.3 POST 9/11 MULTICULTURE AND THE IMMANENT QUESTION OF BEING AND BELONGING 25 3 CONVIVIAL MULTICULTURE 32 3.1 RACE AND THE EVERYDAY POLITICS OF BELONGING 35 3.2 REFLEXIVE NEGOTIATIONS OF DIFFERENCE 38 3.3 PROSAIC NEGOTIATIONS OF DIFFERENCE AND AFFECTIVE ENCOUNTERS 43 3.4 ARE WE MARKED BY RACE’S MATERIALITY? 47 4 ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICS OF THE (IM)PERSONAL 53 4.1 ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE DIASPORIC SUBJECT 55 4.2 ON METHODS 59 4.3 REFLEXIVITY 63 4.4 A TURN TOWARDS THE IMPERSONAL 66 5 REFLEXIVE NEGOTIATION OF DIFFERENCE: THE EPIDERMAL REFLEX 72 5.1 WHY ARE YOUR LIPS SO BIG? 73 5.2 BEING BLACK: ASCRIPTIVE NEGOTIATIONS OF DIFFERENCE 78 5.3 MIMETIC POPULAR CULTURE 87 6 AFFILIATIVE NEGOTIATIONS AND THE SEARCH FOR SOLIDARITY 99 6.1 DIASPORIC SENSIBILITY 102 6.2 FRESH OFF THE BOAT 105 6.3 AFFILIATIVE NEGOTIATIONS AND HEGEMONIC SCHOOLING 113 6.4 AFRICAN FRIENDS AND ETHNIC SOLIDARITY: SEEKING ROOTS AND UNDERSTANDING 118 7 THE SIGNS OF COLLECTIVE BECOMING 125 7.1 CUEING OUR CAPACITIES 129 7.2 AFFECTIVE ATTUNEMENT 138 7.3 THE SIGN OF THE COLLECTIVE 147 8 FORCED HOMOGENIZATION 155 8.1 THE ARRIVAL 157 8.2 FAILED ENCOUNTERS 162 8.3 FERAL BELONGINGS AND THE SPECTRE OF RACE 168 9 THE ETHICS OF EXCESS 176 9.1 THE DYNAMIC LOGIC OF BECOMING AFRICAN AUSTRALIAN 179 9.2 ETHICS OF EXCESS 183 REFERENCES 186 iv Abstract This thesis explores the intertwined problems of belonging and becoming as seen through the lens of the African Australian experience. What is at stake is the question of what it would mean to think through and represent the specific and non- generalisable experiences of being ‘African Australian’, without preventing the becoming that, I will argue, is proper to all social experience. This problem is explored through a qualitative study of African Australian youth, involving in-depth interviews and participant observation. While I highlight some of the peculiarities of the Australian experience, my aim is to use the empirical material to productively reinflect the problems of belonging and becoming as they play out in an always emergent sociality. An analysis of the empirical material suggests that there are two clearly identifiable modes by which African Australian youth negotiate the sense of their difference, which I refer to as ascriptive and affiliative negotiations of difference. I suggest that such negotiations of difference play an important role in enabling those for whom racial difference has a negative status to actively and productively engage that difference. Yet such negotiations of difference risk remaining constrained by the epidermal reflex and the manner in which race folds back into – or, to use the term that I develop in the thesis, perplicates in – social experience. Yet the empirical material also points to the more open and indeterminate aspects of everyday encounters, which I theorise through the lens of affect theory. I argue for the significance of a Deleuzian reading of affect, which distinguishes itself from more subjective understandings of affect by insisting on a shift away from identity as the ground of social experience, towards an ontology of differentiation, process and becoming. I conclude that convivial multiculture is best understood in both its micropolitical and macropolitical aspects. Convivial multiculture, seen from the point of view of an ontology of difference and becoming, is an emergent social field that is always already in play; yet, it requires convivial practices to enable its expression in social reality. While I argue for the significance of this more indeterminate and excessive aspect of the African Australian experience, I also stress that experience cannot be understood without grasping the way that race perplicates within it. The novelty of my argument is to offer new ways of conceptualising the complex relationship between belonging and becoming within the context of the problem of race. For all the ways that race folds back into social experience, if we take the question ‘how do I belong?’ as a productive impetus rather than a problem to be solved, we may be able to better attune to the openness and unpredictability of what is to come. 1 Acknowledgements This thesis was written as a part time student, whilst working as a teacher/executive teacher and raising three children. Over the time of researching and writing there have been a number of people who have expressed interest in my work or offered other forms of support, from reading groups, to work colleagues, to family members and friends, to dads on soccer fields. I would like to extend a general thank you for these gestures of conviviality. Those deserving of special mention include: Dr Scott Sharpe Dr JD Dewsbury Miss Alex Dashwood Rohan (Todd) and Pip (Barter) Dr David Lucas Ms Emily Lenton Dr Ute Eickelkamp The Difference Lab To my participants, thank you; this thesis would not have been possible without your invaluable contribution in sharing in this becoming. And a special thanks to my supervisors: Dr Affrica Taylor for providing me with the original guidance in the early stages of the Doctorate. Dr Bloul who steered me through the transition to ANU, and who continually challenged my thinking, and taught me much about embodied encounters. And finally, to Dr Maria Hynes who introduced me to affect theory, pushed me through the final stages to submission, and who is an inspiring scholar, writer and friend. To Arantxa, Makhosi and Ione… Ethkoza 2 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Are we a priori African Australian? In a consideration of the status of feminism in the early 1990s, Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 163) highlights the importance of women ‘exploring and interrogating their own specific, and non-generalisable forms of becoming, desiring-production and being.’ Grosz articulates well a problem that is central to this thesis, though here the question concerns what it would mean to enable the being, the belonging and the becoming, specific to the diasporic identity I am calling ‘African-Australianness.’ What would it mean to think through and represent the specific and non- generalisable experiences of being ‘African Australian’, without preventing the becoming that, I will argue, is proper to all social experience? We must be wary that the commonly used term African Australian does not become a tool of the exclusionary politics of belonging. Whether the term is appropriated by those of black African descent who seek an identification as such, or by those who seek to denote the individual and collective identity of ‘others’, the use of the identification ‘African Australian’ risks producing a discursive representation, an a priori social category that may not be readily understood or accepted by those thus designated. Such identification may overplay the discontinuities, or indeed underplay the links, between the individual identities, collective representations and the political transformations that may characterise and constitute the collective sense of Africans in Australia. Adopting the notion of ‘African Australian’1 as an authentic social or cultural identity also runs the risk of assuming the characteristic of ‘race’ as its centre. My concern is that if race is assumed to be the central tenet of such identification, it may not be possible to disrupt “racially inflected expressions” that, as Garret Duncan (2005: 101) asserts, ‘give enduring forms of oppression and inequality their appearance of normalcy and naturalness.’ What matters, he argues, is that we can move beyond the ‘reproduction of received ‘realities’’, such as those that racial discourses offer, in order to ‘explore the epistemology and interplay of different ontologies that may create this reproduction.’ While Duncan argues for a ‘counternarrative or counterstory’ as an antidote to these racially inflected expressions, I am especially interested in the possibility of exploring different ontologies in order to challenge the way in which ‘race’ is problematized to begin with. The language of racial or ethnic identity for example, requires taking identity as the ontological basis of our experience, and this involves ontological 1 I would like the reader to bear in mind that the identification ‘African Australian’ is merely used to denote the emergence of the community. It is not, as the argument throughout the thesis illustrates, an a priori identification. 3 commitments, which this thesis seeks to problematise and indeed to displace from centre-field. This is not to say that the question of what it would mean to be identified as, or even to identify with, African Australianness is not important, and that the question of one’s belonging to such an identity can only be asked through an attention to the more phenomenological problem of the experience of identification. Yet the question of the becoming of those tentatively identifying as African Australian requires that an ontology that puts difference at the fore be given its due place in our thinking.