Convivial multiculture and the perplication of race: the dynamics of becoming African Australian
Creators: name: Zwangobani, Kirk
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2016
Subjects: race
ethnicity
perplication of race
belonging and becoming
ontology of affect
convivial multiculture
indeterminate and emergent sociality
epidermal reflex
naïve essentialism
mimetic popular culture
the emergence of race in social experience
reflexive negotiations of difference
political collectivism
forced homogenisation
affective attunement
capacity to act
micropolitics
macropolitics
rite of passage into hegemonic relations
ethics of excess
consciousness
African Australian
African diaspora
ethnography
autoethnography
migration
racism

description: This thesis explores the intertwined problems of belonging and becoming as seen through the lens of the African Australian experience. What is at stake is the question of what it would mean to think through and represent the specific and non-generalisable experiences of being ‘African Australian’, without preventing the becoming that, I will argue, is proper to all social experience. This problem is explored through a qualitative study of African Australian youth, involving in-depth interviews and participant observation. While I highlight some of the peculiarities of the Australian experience, my aim is to use the empirical material to productively reinflect the problems of belonging and becoming as they play out in an always emergent sociality. An analysis of the empirical material suggests that there are two clearly identifiable modes by which African Australian youth negotiate the sense of their difference, which I refer to as ascriptive and affiliative negotiations of difference. I suggest that such negotiations of difference play an important role in enabling those for whom racial difference has a negative status to actively and productively engage that difference. Yet such negotiations of difference risk remaining constrained by the epidermal reflex and the manner in which race folds back into – or, to use the term that I develop in the thesis, perplicates in – social experience. Yet the empirical material also points to the more open and indeterminate aspects of everyday encounters, which I theorise through the lens of affect theory. I argue for the significance of a Deleuzian reading of affect, which distinguishes itself from more subjective understandings of affect by insisting on a shift away from identity as the ground of social experience, towards an ontology of differentiation, process and becoming. I conclude that convivial multiculture is best understood in both its micropolitical and macropolitical aspects. Convivial multiculture, seen from the point of view of an ontology of difference and becoming, is an emergent social field that is always already in play; yet, it requires convivial practices to enable its expression in social reality. While I argue for the significance of this more indeterminate and excessive aspect of the African Australian experience, I also stress that experience cannot be understood without grasping the way that race perplicates within it. The novelty of my argument is to offer new ways of conceptualising the complex relationship between belonging and becoming within the context of the problem of race. For all the ways that race folds back into social experience, if we take the question ‘how do I belong?’ as a productive impetus rather than a problem to be solved, we may be able to better attune to the openness and unpredictability of what is to come.