National Multiculturalism, Transnational Identities

This paper looks at the tension between official multiculturalism, understood as a nation-building project that seeks to incorporate migrants into a unified national community even while recognising and fostering their difference, and the extra-national identifications, connections and practices that characterise really existing or everyday multiculturalism in Australia. This tension will be explored by way of the experiences of Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Turkish and Burmese Mon communities in Sydney and Canberra. It argues that the 'new' multicultural subjects dwell between assimilation and transnationalism in a way that challenges our ability to theorise them, and the multicultural nation-state's capacity to recognise and engage them. In future research on migration in Australia, we will need to continue to take cognisance of the established nature of migrants' claims to national belonging and the reality of their local cultural becomings and hybridities; and at the same time take account of the lithe and multi-scalar nature of their identifications beyond the boundaries of proximate community, locality and nation.