Arab-Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging

(Paperback)

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

Reviews

"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

"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." --Australian Book Review

Author Bio

Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne. He has held many international visiting professorships including at Harvard, at The Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, The University of Copenhagen and The American University of Beirut. He works in the areas of comparative nationalism, racism and multiculturalism. He is the author of many publications in this domain; most known among them is White Nation- Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Routledge 2000). He also works in social theory with a particular interest in the work of Pierre Bourdieu.