The paradox of Whiteness: Neoliberal multiculturalism and the case of Chinese international students in Australia

Since its formal inception in the 1970s, Australian (ethno-) ‘multiculturalism’ has been a source of debate over the nation’s imagined trajectory. This internal or national discourse has, inter alia, critiqued the unchanging racialised power relations between groups, where ethnocultural plurality becomes subsumed under a predominant White governmentality. In this article, however, we consider a particular difficulty in sustaining a ‘truly’ multicultural narrative of contemporary Australian society from an extra-national perspective. To do so, we draw from in-depth interviews with 28 Chinese international students (CIS) in Australia to examine how a White Australia is constructed and normalised from outside the state. We utilise these perspectives to argue for the importance of considering extra-national factors in maintaining this racialised imaginary of Australia as a White nation. This argument also foregrounds the challenge of Australia’s neoliberal multiculturalism project in capitalising on a normative multiculturalism on the international stage, highlighting an extra-national difficulty to fully commit to a multicultural re-imagining of the nation that is divorced from a racialist narrative. This further presents a conundrum for the Australian state racialised as White. That is, the need to relinquish a White face to engender better social cohesion amongst its ethnoculturally diverse populations paradoxically exists in tandem with the need to maintain a White face for the attraction of more diversity, at least for economic benefits in this globalised, neoliberal era.