« Settlers are typically guilty and uncaring (non-innocent care may help): Lisa Slater, ‘Learning to Stand with Gyack: A Practice of Thinking with Non-Innocent Care’, Australian Feminist Studies, 2021
An ‘Indigenousless’ era (obviously not)? John R. Legg, ‘Indigenous and Settler Violence during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 20, 4, 2021, pp. 557-560 »

The ‘wrong’ settlers: Catherine Ann Martin, ‘The Chinese Invasion: Settler Colonialism and the Metaphoric Construction of Race’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2021

07Nov21

Abstract: The arrival of Chinese immigrants during the Australian goldrushes of the 1850s precipitated a vehement backlash, culminating in legislation to restrict their immigration. Contemporary Australian press discourse focused on Chinese racial difference, with immigrants metaphorically constructed as invaders, influxes and hordes of barbarians. This article argues that Chinese immigrants were racialised through pre-existing metaphoric language of deviance and threat, while the metaphors became simultaneously codified as signifiers of racial difference. It further argues that this characterisation resulted from settler-colonial anxieties about legitimacy, which intensified due to Chinese immigration. The consequent racialisation of Chinese immigrants functioned as a means to displace both the violence of settler-colonial invasion and lower-class white deviance, facilitating the construction of the egalitarian white Australian subject.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
%d bloggers like this: