Boundaries of Belonging: Iraqi Refugees in Australia
Katie Vasey, Monash University
In a country such as Australia, where people originate from 185 countries, many people have the capacity to live their everyday lives both 'here' and 'there,' across and between two or more nation-states, where the construction of their identities extends beyond Australia's national boundaries. In this paper, I explore how the existing multicultural policy connects, interacts with and accommodates the 'transnational.' I address the complex and ambivalent relationship between the national and transnational. I argue that the transnational possibilities, understood in terms of the challenge that cultural pluralism poses to national master narratives, are often suffocated by a predominately national, if not nationalistic, framework. Through an ethnographic examination of the everyday processes and practices that are experienced by Iraqi refugees in a small country town in Victoria, I will demonstrate how migrants' normative membership is predominantly defined within the boundaries of the nation state at both national and local levels. Iraqi people in general and Iraqi women in particular are deeply entwined with their status as non-nationals, as foreigners, even though many have formal citizenship status (or the privileges and rights of formal citizenship). This results in their exclusion in substantive terms from dominant sectors of society and from dominant representations of society.
