Cultural Studies/Australian History
Book Details

Arab-Australians Today

Citizenship and Belonging

Ghassan Hage (ed.)

Arab-Australians Today raises important questions about immigration, settlement, marginalisation and participation in Western societies.

Opinion

'This important collection raises fundamental questions about citizenship and belonging in an historical era in which identity is even more ethnicised than it used to be, and where struggles over access to citizenship, dispossession and colonialism are heavily invested with ethnic and racial features.' (Anna Yeatman, Australian Book Review, June/July 2002)

". . . a well presented collection of essays. . . Arab perspectives and cultural values are given full play, and a challenging postscript was added after September 11." (The Australian Higher Education Supplement, 5/6/02)

About this Title

Arab people first came to Australia in the late nineteenth century. Today more than half a million Australians claim some form of Arab ancestry.

They are a diverse group, both socially and economically. New South Wales, for example, appointed Australia’s first Lebanese Governor, while at the same time it was labelling groups of economically deprived young people as ‘Lebanese gangs’. Victoria’s Premier, Steve Bracks, comes from a Lebanese background. Melbourne has an important Arab business community, while newly arrived Arab immigrants have one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country.

Arab-Australians Today raises important questions about immigration, settlement, marginalisation and participation in Western societies. It discusses the way early Arab immigrants were received in Australia and talks about contemporary issues of participation in the Australian political process. It examines the lives of diverse groups of people, ranging from entrepreneurs to Arab women activists to unemployed youth. It analyses issues ranging from the ways Arab-Australians grow to call Australia home, to the moral panic created around Arab youth and criminality.

The book offers non-Arab-Australians a way to better understand the Arab presence in Australia. It is also an invitation for Arab-Australians to reflect on the history of their settlement in Australia, as well as on the current experience of more recent immigrants.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contributors

Citizenship and Honourability: belonging to Australia today
Ghassan Hage
1 Whitewashed: the Lebanese in Queensland, 1880-1947
Anne Monsour
2 From 'White Australia' to Multiculturalism: citizenship and identity
Trevor Batrouney
3 The Arab Diaspora: immigration history and the narratives of presence, Australia, Canada and the USA
Brian Aboud
4 Arab Entrepreneurs in Australia
Jock Collins
5 On being Lebanese-Australian: hybridity, essentialism and strategy among Arabic-speaking youth
Grag Noble and Paul Tabar
6 'Street Arabs' and 'Mug Lairs': racsim, class relations and moral panic about Lebanese-Australian youth
Scott Poynting
7 Arab-Australian Women's Activism
Paula Abood
8 The Australian Arabic Council: anti-racist activism
Ray Jureidini and Ghassan Hage
9 The Differential Intesities of Social Reality: migration, participation and guilt
Ghassan Hage
10 Injuries and Identities: authorising Arab diasporic difference in crisis
Michael Humphrey
11 Being Elsewhere: on longing and belonging
Abbas El-Zein
Postscript: Arab-Australian belonging after 'September 11'
Ghassan Hage

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Ghassan Hage is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. He has published widely in the areas of nationalism, racism, multiculturalism and diasporic studies. He is the author of Home/World (1997) and White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (1998).

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978-0-522-84979-0