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This polemic publication is Ghassan Hage's first book, after many much-quoted articles and a scholarly reputation
that continues to grow through different disciplines from sociology to literary studies to race theory. Up until
now, I had been most convinced by Hage's article "Locating Multiculturalism's Other: A Critique of Practical
Tolerance" (New Formations 24 [1994]: 19-34). This article emphasised the sinister connotations of
'tolerance', teasing out the term from one touted with celebration and pride to one that reflects a narrow and
insular perspective on international and domestic race relations. I was glad to see this point taken further and
Hage's theories become more fully fleshed out in the book. He goes on to separate, politically, ideas of belonging
by citizenship or through "cultural descent", then explicates the management of Australian sociocultural space by
dominant White groups and the enduring assumption that 'ethnics' are objects to be governed. These are not
groundbreaking ideas in themselves, as citizenship and postcolonial studies have addressed these themes
consistently. What is new about Hage's approach is the manner in which he has applied them to Australian
contingencies.
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White Nation's succinct and engaging style makes it a pleasure to read. While his close readings of, and
dependency on, Pierre Bourdieu could have become obtrusive, Hage seems to be aware of this and peppers the rest of
the text with cogent examples of recent Australian social and political history. He demarcates the boundaries of his
argument, well aware that the process of confronting Hansonite rhetoric can easily be hijacked by outright dismissal
of the phenomenon. Hage quotes Bourdieu's point about the role of an intellectual being "not to deplore, not to
laugh, not to detest, but to understand" (21). This important grounding lends the text the ability to 'recover' and
seriously consider the facets of unease and dissatisfaction which parts of the Australian population so obviously
experience. He is more interested in what forms multiculturalism takes in Australia, rather than whether
multiculturalism per se is 'good' or 'bad'.
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Hage opens White Nation with "(a conjunctural) preface" that declares "My Granny is Seizing Power!" From this
short section, he establishes his motivation for writing the book and summarises the creeping conservatism of
Australian politics in particular, and international relations in general. His critical eye turns subsequently to
the dampening of discourse about race in Australia, a situation to which he attributes the growing discourse of the
most victimised group in Australia being White Folks.
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An intriguing display of fraught subject positioning and academic objectiveness is embodied by the process involved
when interviews were conducted with White Australians on issues of migration and population. The "inhibition"
assumed from the interviewee if Hage were interviewer gives rise to questions of whether there is anyone who could
be interviewer without inhibiting the interviewee in some way. The assumption that Hage would be suitable to
interview any non-white subjects remained unquestioned. The use of these interviews, woven into the discursive text
as examples of various modes of thinking and expressing certain tropes of what 'multiculturalism' is, has caused
some readers to comment on the lack of a proper 'sample' from which to extrapolate. I would argue that Hage's aim is
not to present a comprehensive sociological view of Australian versions of multiculturalism but to survey a
selection of opinions and track their justifications. This is especially true of the reasoning for multiculturalism
following on from the "Hansonisation of the soul" (a phrase that Hage coins).
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The latter chapters clarify the much-neglected topic of race and class in Australia, especially when considering
perceptions of middle-class Australians of Asian descent. As an example of the kinds of alienation felt by some
Australians, one interviewee comments, "you know how they say 'The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting
poorer.' They forgot to add that the rich are becoming Asian, and the poor are becoming Australian" (215). Covering
this important silence in race and multicultural studies in Australia thus far lifts White Nation from only
summarising ethnic/white or Aboriginal/white relations. Hage acknowledges the scarcity of criticism about
Aboriginal-ethnic relations, expressing the hope that he will rectify this in future research.
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In an otherwise stimulating, contentious, and deft mapping of White dominance and the maintenance of the status quo
in Australian cultural politics, the intersection of race and gender issues remain shadowed. It was especially clear
in Hage's repeated use of the ripping off of Siham's head-scarf in the first sections that the specifics of gender
were not going to be part of the critical equation. Precisely why a Muslim woman is seen by White society as
representing the Other, why she is the likely target of street-violence and verbal abuse, is not approached. Hage
lists off various Gulf War incidents of abuse (27-8), and no further critical engagement is had with the fact that
his examples are all incidents where Muslim women and children are targeted in public spaces. I am not invoking the
primacy of gender over race but surely these associations of power, and the implications of how men and women of
different cultures are perceived, impact on consequent actions and assumptions in a White nation?
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Even with these omissions and its self-confessed tendency to generalise with terms, White Nation should
become a core resource for imminent studies of multiculturalism, nationalism, and race in Australia. Its theoretical
clarity and progression of argument is highly convincing. The book's accomplished drawing together of complex
strands from multicultural and race theories, as well as Australia's recent sociohistorical moments, creates a
timely, challenging, and productive text.
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Details
White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society.
By Ghassan Hage. Annandale, NSW: Pluto, 1998. ISBN: 1-86403-056-9; RRP: A$ 24.95.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Tseen Khoo. "Polemic Publication: Ghassan Hage's 'White Nation'." M/C Reviews 16 Oct. 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/white.html>.
Chicago style:
Tseen Khoo, "Polemic Publication: Ghassan Hage's 'White Nation'," M/C Reviews 16 Oct. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/white.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Tseen Khoo. (1999) Polemic Publication: Ghassan Hage's 'White Nation'. M/C Reviews 16 Oct. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/white.html> ([your date of access]).
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![[image]](http://media.socialchange.net.au/pluto/images/whitenation.gif)