‘They’re coming’: Precarity and the white nation fantasy among South African migrants in Melbourne

Abstract

This paper explores the social reproduction of precarity among white South African migrants in Australia. Building on Griffiths and Prozesky’s elucidation of the white South African imaginary and its role in triggering emigration, we draw on ethnographic data on white South Africans living in Melbourne to argue that our informants reproduce what Hage terms a ‘white nation fantasy’. In documenting the ways our informants’ migration experiences can be read as a function of a threatened social imaginary, we suggest that their ‘successful’ resettlement in Australia points to the congruence of their ontological grounding with the white nation fantasy predominating in Australia. Ultimately, however, we argue that the sense of precarity our informants experience in Australia is intrinsically embedded in their reproduction of the white nation fantasy. Our case study therefore serves as a cautionary tale to inflexible constructions of whiteness globally.

A psychosocial study of guilt and shame in White South African migrants to Australia.

“…A body of research literature has been building a rather consistent portrayal of White South African migrants as ambassadors of remorseless Whiteness, who not only deny the suffering of their Black compatriots and their complicity in this suffering, but also abandon familial and social networks with no acknowledgment of the loss they are inflicting on “those left behind” (Marchetti-Mercer, 2012). McKenzie and Gressier (2016), referring to these migrants’ experience of Australia as an “Arcadian paradise,” claimed that they resettle easily because they discover a sense of congruence between their worldview and “the White nation fantasy predominating in Australia” (p. 3). This echoes Crush’s, 2013 conclusions that White South African migrants to Canada constitute a guilt-free, shameless, and victim-identified diaspora, relentlessly negative about their “dystopian” Black homeland.…”

“…The contemporary research portrayals of these migrants are less than edifying. They emerge as self-pitying postapartheid “victims,” unapologetically reactionary and disparaging toward their homeland, indifferent to the social impact of their departure, and unreflectively engaged in self-seeking distortion of recent South African history and their own motives for leaving (Crush, 2013; Marchetti-Mercer, 2012; McKenzie & Gressier, 2016). While citing crime, violence, and deteriorating standards, their unarticulated reason for migrating is the pursuit of facilitating environments for their habitual Whiteliness (Taylor, 2004).…”