AustLit
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Contents
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Miracle Baby : A Reparative Reading of Mixed Race Identity and Nation in Peaches,
single work
criticism
(p. 230-241)
'The mixed race subject is increasingly emerging in popular Australian media as a poster child of multiculturalism, entangled with post-racial discourses. This dominant representation perpetuates reductive understandings of mixed race experience rooted in compulsory optimism and the erasure of history, which in turn bolster exclusionary imaginings of Australian national identity. I seek alternatives to these constructions through an analysis of the 2004 Australian film Peaches, a markedly understudied text, which centres the coming of age of mixed race protagonist Steph. I adopt Eve Sedgwick’s ‘reparative reading’ approach, which enables generative modes of analysis that seek to imagine new alternatives through textual critique. I focus on two key filmic sites – the ambivalent affects circulated by Steph, and the haunting queer temporality pervading the narrative. I argue that these two sites hold the potential for complex, open-ended understandings of mixed race identity, and in turn, modes of national identity that can re-centre unresolved histories and contested dynamics of race in Australia.' (Production abstract)
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Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism? Here Come the Habibs!, Race, Identity and Representation,
single work
criticism
(p. 242-256)'In February 2016 Channel Nine broadcast six episodes of Here Come the Habibs!. The show was a comedy about a Lebanese-Australian family who win 22 million dollars in the lottery and move from working-class Lakemba to upper-class Vaucluse where they buy a house next to the very white O’Neills. The show invokes key tropes of official multiculturalism most importantly race and identity. At the same time, official multiculturalism has been in decline in Australia since the advent of John Howard’s conservative prime ministership in 1996. Official multiculturalism focused on ethnic groups and their cultures. It has been supplanted by the ideas of neoliberalism which is concerned above all with individuals and the market. In this article I argue that Here Come the Habibs! is, in the end, nostalgic for a multiculturalism which is no longer privileged in Australia. The dynamics of the tension between the Habibs and O’Neills has been displaced, as is signalled in the final episode of the show, by the entry into Australia of a mobile, cosmopolitan elite whose worth is measured not in their culture but in what they can economically contribute to the country.'
