Abstract
This paper discusses experiences of everyday racism as narrated by South Sudanese refugee-background informants living in Australia. The paper draws on accounts of verbal and physical attacks reported during a sociolinguistic interview about the refugee experience and adaptation to the Australian lifestyle. The study contributes to the exploration of features of refugee narratives, using the socio-interactional approach to narrative analysis. Selected stories about racism are explored using positioning theory, paying attention to the discursive strategies narrators use to position themselves in the interactional world of the interview setting as well as the story-world. Their narratives demonstrate that despite the harsh experiences of everyday racism, they position themselves as resilient and strong individuals. They do this by drawing on their refugee history and making references to harder times. However, the stories also reveal their mitigation strategies to soften the accounts and either downplay or deny racism. However, by sharing their stories and making explicit evaluative statements about social injustice, they mobilise their agency to make their story heard.
Keywords
Introduction
This study adds to current work on racism and critical approaches to the study of racist discourse, with a particular focus on how victims of racist attacks make sense of these experiences and how they construct their stories in interaction. While previous studies have shown that people (the offenders) engage in denying, mitigating, justifying and excusing negative acts and views towards minorities in order to position themselves as decent, moral, reasonable citizens (Augoustinos and Every, 2010), this paper is focussed on the other side: the victims themselves. It draws on narrative theory with the dual purpose to (i) unpack participants’ stories about their experiences of racism; and (ii) expand current empirical work on refugee narratives by documenting the discursive manifestations of re-telling past personal experiences. Personal oral narratives provide an ideal discursive resource for the study of identity, as narratives are always versions of reality, and they are not objective, omniscient accounts (Ochs and Capps, 1996). The stories do not tell us and are not to be taken as the representations of transparent truth about what happened, but how the teller makes sense of the event. In this sense, personal oral narratives provide a discursive ground for the exploration of selves. Self, here, is understood as ‘unfolding reflective awareness of being-in-the-world, including a sense of one’s past and future’ (Ochs and Capps, 1996, p. 21). This temporal dimension of the narrative adds yet another layer, where the teller uses chronotopic references and connects past, present and future selves. Participants are South-Sudanese refugees living in regional in Australia, and while these narratives go back to over some years, their relevance holds today.
The theoretical approach
In this paper, narratives are defined broadly and do not necessarily fit the canonical structure of the Labovian stories of the reporting of past events in a chronological order (Labov and Waletzky, 1967). The stories told in this paper are referred as ‘narratives’ because they are oral accounts of past events, but they include temporal shifts to present, make use of hypothetical, habitual and generic narratives, that is small stories about everyday life (De Fina and Tseng, 2017). While oral personal narratives typically happen in everyday casual interactions, the stories discussed here were told in a relatively formal setting, during a sociolinguistic interview. While some scholars have criticised elicited narratives for being unnatural, narratives told in interview settings share many characteristics with conversational narratives (De Fina, 2009) and the interview setting provides an important analytical starting position. While in the examples I discuss in the following sections there is not much verbalised interaction from the interviewer, the interviewer being the listener shapes the way the talk is constructed. Speakers actively manage and design both the production and the reception of utterances by considering their listeners (Goffman, 1981; Schiffrin, 2006).
I draw on the interactional sociolinguistic tradition in narratives (Bamberg, 1997; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Baynham and De Fina, 2017; Bruner, 1991; De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Schiffrin, 2006) to ‘account for our ability to interpret what participants intend to convey in everyday communicative practice’ (Gumperz, 2015 p. 309). This approach brings attention to the context of the speech event (not just talk as text) to recognise the dialogic relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee as well as between the narrative and the narrative event (De Fina, 2009, p. 234). As narratives are often co-constructed (Baynham and De Fina, 2017), this approach sees the narrative as a process and as social practice (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2008), rather than just text; hence the analysis informs questions of tellability in narrative defined as ‘the recounting of unusual or exceptional events’ (De Fina, 2009, p.237) and cuts across the macro or socially driven interactional order of how things happen in talk and the micro-level negotiation of who participants are and how they align themselves in situ as well as in the story.
Positioning theory and the analytical focus
While some prior studies have focussed on the credibility of narratives, especially in the context of asylum seekers (see e.g., Smith-Khan, 2017) and some others have critiqued essentialist ontologies of identity construction vis-à-vis refugees by media outlets (Hanson-Easey et al., 2014), this paper looks at refugees’ positioning in interaction during an interview which elicited recounts of their lived experiences in their country of settlement, Australia. This approach allows for the exploration of their identity work as dynamic and views identity and narrative as inseparable: Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds (Ochs and Capps, 1996, p. 19)
Therefore, the central analytical focus in this paper is the way tellers construct their narrative and what strategies they employ to manage the ‘uptake’ by the listener; how they enhance or mitigate the effect of their story. For this, I use positioning theory (Bamberg, 1997; Davies and Harré, 1990; Harré and Langenhove, 1991; Schiffrin, 2006) and investigate how participants relate to the past experience (story world) and how they position themselves in the narrating event.
Aligned with interactional sociolinguistics, my focus looks at talk in context where the interactional order is somewhat socially pre-determined, nevertheless negotiated through the management of the act of narration itself (Hill, 2016). While this interactional order was first conceptualised by Goffman as frame (see e.g., Goffman’s, 1974), Davies and Harré (1990) criticised Goffman’s concept for being static and largely aligning with schemas. They argued for a more dynamic concept that captures the speaker’s position in the moment of speech. Also, while Goffman argued that real experience is ‘framed’ differently in different social contexts or situations, the mutual understanding of what the situation desires becomes problematic in speech events including participants from different cultural contexts. As Gumperz (2015) stated, ‘culturally specific presuppositions play a key role in inferring what is intended’ (p. 310). The interactional sociolinguistic approach is well-suited for the purpose of the discursive analysis applied in this paper, as it emphasises the importance of context and foregrounds participants’ understandings about what counts as racism (Rafaely, 2021). We gain an insight into the way they position themselves in the stories and the interactional setting of the telling, and the discursive strategies they use to make their stories suitable for the interview context. Framing and positioning go beyond the static concept of ‘role’ and allow researchers to explore how tellers project their selves moment by moment in the interaction. These concepts also help researchers unpack identity work reflecting a ‘layered understanding of social life – that is, of selves and situations as multifaceted, complex, and ambiguous’ (Gordon, 2015, p. 324).
Therefore, framing and positioning offer useful analytical tools for capturing the social and psychological aspects of interactions. Some of the other concepts scholars have used to explore identity in narrative include footing, stance, evaluation and involvement, which all contribute to finding ways to break down macro-identity labels and link micro-level identity work to discourse (Georgakopoulou, 2007). While there is a considerable level of fuzziness around how scholars delineate between some of these concepts (Gordon, 2015), in this paper, I use the term frame to highlight common expectations of the communicative event (e.g., the interview), while I use the term positioning to capture the dynamic ways interlocutors communicate and index their social and emotional relations and their alignments both in terms of the story told and the act of narration. I align with scholars who work from the ontological and epistemological foundation that identity is performed through discourse (Bamberg, 1997; Baynham, 2006; De Fina et al., 2006). Positioning, as an analytical tool, therefore, is particularly useful for exploring narrators’ emotions and attitudes, and the way they locate themselves and others in the stories told (Davies and Harré, 1990).
Layers of positionings in narratives
While positioning can be applied in any interactional context, in the context of narratives (accounts of past experiences), this analytical tool offers further insights, not only in terms of the expression of self in the here-and-now of the given interaction, but also in the there-and-then of the narrated event. According to Bamberg (1997), positionings in narrative discourse can be conceptualised on three levels: Positioning Level 1 (relates to the factual world): How does the teller position themselves to the real world? Positioning Level 2 (relates to the interactional world): How does the teller position themselves to the interlocutor? (the interviewer), and Positioning Level 3 (relates to the story world): How does the teller position themselves to other participants in the story? While these levels interact, it is in this third level of positioning that identity work is performed (Schiffrin, 2006), as narrators ‘evaluate themselves as characters and connect the self to broader cultural categories and ideologies’(Gordon, 2015, p. 332). These positionings shed light onto narrator’s agency in dealing with everyday discrimination and racism (see e.g., Hatoss, 2012, 2023). In this paper, I make use of these three levels of positionings and explore how participants positioned themselves in the narrated event (the story told) and the narrating event (the interview setting). I am particularly interested in the discursive strategies participants use to voice their experiences of everyday racism, considering that accusations of racism are ‘morally-laden social actions that require significant amounts of discursive work’ (Rafaely, 2021, p. 335).
Another aspect of identity in narrative is the consideration of what roles speakers take in the textual world and how narrators speak for others (Schiffrin, 2006). While the teller is the ‘source’ of the story told, this role is not unitary but varies in relation to the story: the teller can be a ‘principal’ (or originator and whose position is established), or the animator (the sounding box, who physically produces the words) for which the teller uses various paralinguistic and prosodic cues to ‘vivify the person’ (Goffman, 1974, p. 518). The teller is usually an author, the one who chooses the words of the story lines, unless using words of others as direct speech. While these roles often overlap, there can be interesting discrepancies where the storylines become rich sources for unpacking how tellers express their relationship to the story told. I will draw on these concepts when exploring how participants engage in animating others and how they navigate speaking for another (Schiffrin, 2006). This is particularly important considering the sensitive nature of the topics and the discourse expectations not only in the wider society which considers racism accusations as a social taboo (Augoustinos and Every, 2007), but in the sociolinguistic interview, where power relations were uneven.
Data and method
This paper draws on data collected in a sociolinguistic study (Ethics ref. HC210574) aimed to explore linguistic aspects of the settlement of African refugees in a regional Australian mid-sized town with approximately 100,000 residents. Australia is home to many immigrants from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds with over 27.6% of the population, 7 million people, born overseas (ABS, 2021). Australia also boasts of being one of the leading western democracies resettling refugees. Still, despite explicit policies of multiculturalism advocating for ‘a fair go’ and equality, racially distinct groups have been shown to experience othering (Hatoss, 2012; Udah, 2018), racial discrimination or even abuse (Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017). The location of the research is important as being outside the major urban locale it brings with it a different social milieu, where the majority of the population is born in Australia, and the ratio of immigrant groups is relatively low both in terms of overall numbers as well as diversity. Rural and regional spaces have been commonly perceived as ‘white’, with low numbers of ‘non-white’ ethnic minorities (Forrest and Dunn, 2013).
While the broader research project collected over 100 interviews of approximately one hour in length each, the discussion in this paper draws on a sub-set of 14 interviews which specifically focussed on settlement experiences and life stories. These interviews were conducted with the help of an Australian white research assistant as well as a cultural insider, a Dinka speaking community member. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, using fine CA-style transcription conventions (see Appendix). The discussion in this paper is based on some of these selected interview segments which were tagged in Nvivo under the theme of racism experiences. Altogether, 8 out of the 14 interviews had some segments related to reports of racism. However, it is important to point out that this paper takes a qualitative approach and does not attempt to generalise about the experiences of exclusion to the broader sample of respondents interviewed. Researchers working in quantitative paradigms might seek iterativity across a larger sample of cases, but such iterativity is not the aim of this paper.
In view of the broader approach outlined, this paper aims to provide insights into the lived experiences of South Sudanese refugees, and most importantly, and from the theoretical point of view, it seeks to unpack the way participants make sense of these experiences and what discursive tools they apply in their storylines. For this, I will make use of the concept of positioning (Bamberg, 1997) in narrative and explore:
How do narrators position themselves in the narratives: (i) in the narrated events and (ii) in the narrating event (the telling during the interview)?
What discursive strategies do they apply to tell stories about adverse experiences? How do they balance the discursive need to be heard and the social taboo of racism accusations?
It is important to keep in mind that the interaction occurs between insiders (South Sudanese facilitator and participant) and outsiders (non-Sudanese researchers) in a relatively formal and structured interview setting. This setting provides an opportunity to explore how tellers navigate their discursive resources to make their stories fit the context. In the following, I will provide examples of thematically selected accounts which talked to racism experiences and analyse them in detail with the aims and the analytical tools in mind. The segments reported in this paper were selected purposefully to ensure that male and female participants were included and to provide diverse interview setting contexts, such as including some segments with cultural facilitators, and other interviews which were conducted with the help of white research assistants.
Analysis
In the first narrative text, I draw on the interview with Daniel (pseudonym, survey interview 21) conducted with a father of five children from South Sudan. He came to Australia in 2003 through the offshore humanitarian settlement programme after a lengthy refugee journey of 6 years in Ethiopia and 11 years in Kenya. Three of his children were born in Kenya in transition, and two were born in Australia. When asked about how people generally related to him in everyday context in the first years when he arrived, Daniel reminisced about his positive experience stating that in his local town, he found the community ‘very, very accepting’. However, he commented further that ‘of course’ this is just a general statement and ‘if you’ve got 10 people, eight people love you and two people doesn’t like you, you just say yeah, that’s fine, that’s how things are’. This disclaimer indicated that the experience was not fully positive. Against this backdrop, it was interesting to hear an account of a racist attack that he deployed through the interview (see Excerpt 1). The interviewer in this case was a white male research assistant.
Excerpt 1: ‘Only one thing that happened to me’
In Excerpt 1, the narrative starts in line 8, and it is an account of a past experience of an incident which happened 5 years before the interview. This time lag triggered the use of temporal and spatial distancing which introduced the story (line 8). This discursive move allows the speaker to distance himself from the lived experience and mitigate the emotional impact of the telling. The time lag also helped him mitigate the force of making people accountable, since the people involved are less likely to be part of the community surrounding the teller at the time of the telling. After a brief orientation establishing the context of going to the shop to buy milk, the complicating action starts when the offender is introduced as a ‘gentleman’ who simply asked ‘How are you?’ (line 11). His lexical choice of ‘gentleman’ to introduce his offender is a social reference made either deliberately or subconsciously to show his good intentions in the interactional world of the interview, and to position himself as a polite person in front of his interlocutor, the white male interviewer. It also has the effect of sarcasm, considering the story that follows. The narrative continues by directly quoting (animating) the conversation between him and the offender. While the teller is the author (choosing the words), his use of animated speech serves the purpose of adding credibility of the account and helps the narrator to re-construct the story in an authentic way. In line 18, he animates the verbal offence: GO (.) you stupid black African (.) go back home. His stance is paralinguistically enhanced through his laughter, which expresses his surprise or perhaps his embarrassment. It adds a conversational effect of positioning his offender as someone who is harmless against him (evaluation in the story world). While laughter can be used for a variety of communicative functions (Attardo, 2015) in interactions and it can be intentional or unintentional, in this context, his laughter can be a contextualisation cue to signal the delicate nature of the interview content. To some extent, it mirrors the laughter of the interviewer (see line 16), which most likely, fulfils the purpose of cueing his understanding and making sure that the teller feels supported. Through laughter as a contextualisation cue, the interlocutors build trust and alignment in the interactional world.
This is followed by the narrator’s explicit evaluation. In his words, his reaction was physical, (‘I stood there for 10 minutes’) and rational, trying to make sense of what happened and why. This is made more emphatic by the repetition of the utterance in line 22. Then, Daniel draws on his prior experiences of racism in the refugee camp in Kenya, and simply states that such bad things happened to him before. Shifting the narrative to the chronotope of his prior refugee experience was used here as a positioning tool to project himself strong and resilient. His account provides evidence of the subjectivity of his experience influenced by his personal history (Davies and Harré, 1990: 47). In lines 29–30, he sums up the story by referring to his emotional response (a bit of a shock), as he did not expect such negative experiences to occur in Australia. He also adds that this was the only negative experience and makes it explicit and emphatic that it is his own experience only: only one thing that happened to me (.) that is MYSELF (line 31). This concluding comment completes the story and serves as yet another mitigation strategy, refraining from generalisations about racism in Australia and claiming no authority to speak for the other members of his community. This comment, however, has the conversational implicature that there are other experiences that he knows about. This explicit reference to himself (MYSELF, line 31) represents his construction of his self in the textual world as a principal and author, reflecting an epistemic stance (Schiffrin, 2006) as a ‘knower’ and someone who speaks from his own experience, but knows about others. This is confirmed by the second story he deploys about his friends.
In this second story (see Excerpt 2), Daniel tells a story about a friend who bought a house, and they were attacked by a gang. In this story, the victims were the new owners of the house, while the offenders were random criminals who did not like the idea of black people moving into their neighbourhood.
Excerpt 2: ‘Everything was good’
The story starts again with a temporal orientation, a specific reference to the time when the assault occurred, with the function of distancing the story in the past (2 years later). This time, the attack involved physical action (line 34 ‘throwing eggs, stones’) and verbal abuse (line 35 ‘just swear at them and abusing them’). In lines 36–38, a series of swift actions is reported: calling for help by friends, arriving at the scene, calling for the police and the gangs running away. The evaluation in the narrative is expressed in line 39, when he relates his friends’ story to his own personal experience: ‘rings a bell with me’. Then, he makes more generalised evaluations about such racist attacks, referring to them as ‘little few things’ (line 40) maintaining his view that generally the community is ‘very accepting’ (line 41). The final evaluative statement (coda) sums it up and serves the discourse function of denial: EVERYTHING IS GOOD (line 44). This denial, nevertheless, is partly an overgeneralisation on his part drawing on his overall experience in Australia as being accepted in the community. As we have seen from these example accounts, the narrator avoids making direct complaints or accusations and uses the story to give voice to his negative experiences, but when it comes to evaluation, in the interactional space of the interview, he emphasises the positives and downplays the negatives. He positions himself as a happy and peaceful person who is satisfied with the broader community.
In the next example, I draw on an interview (see Excerpt 3) with, Mary (pseudonym), a young mother of two daughters who arrived in Australia in 2000. She lived with her husband who was studying for a business degree at university. She spent 9 years in Kenya in the refugee camp before arriving in Australia. In the interview, Mary was asked if she had any negative experience settling in the community. Her account is about her experience of verbal abuse when walking down the street. The interviewer in this case was a female cultural outsider. Mary was asked to reflect on whether she had encountered any racist attitudes to which she responded in agreement and shared her story.
Excerpt 3: ‘I know what I have been through when I came here’
Her account starts with the classic spatio-temporal references ‘one day’, ‘on the road to a friend’ (line 1), which introduce her story followed by the complicating action of the verbal abuse (line 2) where three men and a woman were shouting at her from a car passing by and verbally abusing her, telling her, ‘go back to your country’. As we have seen in the previous accounts, she uses direct reported speech by animating the offenders to make the story vivid. This direct speech is a positioning strategy which allows the teller to construct the story in a certain way (De Fina, 2003). In this case, her reaction to the verbal abuse is an emotional response which she expresses in the present tense (‘I feel upset’, line 6). The animated voice (direct speech) makes the experience as if it was happening in the here-and-now. The shift to the present tense is noteworthy as the historical present is known to appear rather infrequently in elicited narratives (in comparison with conversational narratives). While its conversational function has been debated due to the vague grammatical reference of the present tense in English (see e.g., Wolfson, 1976), the co-occurrence of emotive language with the historical present is notable here. It is reasonable to assume that this was a subconscious choice made by the speaker and it fulfilled the function of making the story more enlivened and relevant in the present, positioning herself in the interactional world. The use of present tense in narratives can also function as a generaliser, making the experience more broadly applicable outside the immediate context of the narrated event. This participant demonstrated her resilience to such verbal abuse in line 8, where she mirrored the offence with the same expletive (I fuck them also, meaning she talks back to the offenders in the say way). In the second half of the excerpt (lines 9–17), she shows her evaluation and resilience by drawing on the theme of war. She states that she is ‘not worried’ about people saying these bad things considering the hardships that she has been through when fleeing from war in Sudan (see line 15). After this she makes the point that war can happen everywhere (this section deleted due to length), pointing out to the interviewer that Australians can also end up like people in Africa, as wars happen in all countries. By doing so, she positions the interviewer on equal footing. She makes the point that human beings cannot do anything else but move away from war (lines 9–12). In this example, we see a discursive construction of resilience rooted in the chronotopic (Perrino, 2015) reference to the war experience in Africa. In line 17, she makes the final point, ‘I CHOSE TO COME’ (line 17). This example shows her positioning in front of the interlocutor (the interactional world) as rooted in her prior experience. This gives her narrative an intertextual dimension. Resilience is understood here as an ability to reflect and re-evaluate life in light of previous adverse circumstances. Her account explicitly draws a parallel between fleeing from the war in South Sudan and the choice to flee again, if need be, due to racial violence in her community. In summary, she positions herself in the interactional world of the interview as a proud and strong Dinka woman who can cope with any difficulties that life might bring. Nevertheless, she made a vivid representation of the racist attacks she has endured.
The next example is taken from an interview (see Excerpt 4 Interview with Majak (pseudonym) by a male Dinka research assistant, Jacob (pseudonym) which was conducted by one of the South Sudanese research assistants. This meant that the interview happened between two in-group members who share common experiences, cultural and linguistic heritage. This contextual factor no doubt influenced the way the interviewee responded to the questions. However, the in-group experience of the interview was somewhat compromised as it was clear to the teller that the interview was conducted for research and would be available to a broader audience of outgroup members. Jacob, the interviewer, guided the respondent to talk about everyday racism experiences in the work context, as he was well aware of such issues in the community. In the interview, Majak deployed a narrative about some experiences of racism in the workplace. In the example presented, he shared one short account of an incident when his workmate was verbally abusing him and telling him to go back to his country. In this story, he starts by responding to the interviewer’s direct question whether he has experienced any racism in the workplace in Australia (see Excerpt 4).
Excerpt 4: ‘We are just workers’
In Excerpt 4, Majak pre-empts his story (line 2) with several pauses and discourse markers which signal the sensitive nature of the topic and his hesitance in taking on a position as someone who expresses a negative view about Australians. In line 3, he uses the modal ‘might’ to mitigate to the otherwise frequently experienced behaviour exhibited by co-workers who use abusive language such as the one we have heard from the other two respondents: ‘fuck you black’ and ‘fucking go back to your country where you come from’. It is notable that the swearing occurred in a male-to-male interview where there was no outsider. In line 4, Majak continues with accounts of indirect discrimination which he explains that supervisors ‘might IGNORE (.) IGNORE you’ (line 6). The repeated use of the modal ‘might’ is a strategy to move the story from the concrete event to a hypothetical event (hypothetical narrative). This helps the teller to mitigate the story on the one hand, and to express the frequent occurrence of the event (on the other hand. This is followed by Majak’s evaluation in line 7, stating that this behaviour is racist. However, he expresses this with many cues of hesitancy, again, mitigating his claim. These cues include the use of discourse marker ‘actually’ which he uses twice in this utterance, along with three tokens of self-repair: ‘so this (.) I just think (.) I can actually say this’. His pauses also indicate the sensitive nature of the topic and his hesitancy in expressing his negative experience. The use of discourse marker ‘you know’ cannot be taken literally, but it fulfils the function of alignment and solidarity with the in-group member (Jacob) who is conducting the interview. While one would expect in-group members to engage in the discursive practice of co-telling, in this case it did not occur for some reasons. One reason can be that the interview was conducted in English which is not the natural language for them to communicate. It is not the ‘we-code’ they would normally use for discussing everyday matters, especially sensitive topics such as experiences of racism. Secondly, the interview was ‘framed’ and ‘keyed’ in line with the research project and, therefore, gained a formal style where participants performed according to the expectations of the research interview and exercised caution about digressing from the main purpose or goal of the communicative event. This cautious approach also explains why Majak talked in more general and hypothetical terms in the beginning of this segment, referring to some workers more generally who ‘might abuse’ him. He only introduces a specific story in line 10, where he reports having experienced the verbal abuse. His account outlines the series of steps in the event when a co-worker used bad language with him and told him to go back to his country and, in response, he told his supervisor what happened. The supervisor referred the case to the human resource manager and the offender was punished by having to stay away from the workplace for five days and potentially dismissed (lines 11–15). In Line 16, he switches back to the hypothetical narrative about some person who ‘may abuse you as a joke’. By doing this move, he evokes a counter justification for such verbal abuse but also makes the point very clear that such joke is not to be excused. In line 17, he uses the rhetorical move of contrast (black and white) and repeats in again (line 18) to make the point even stronger. The adjective ‘black’ appears six times in this segment, including four times as animating the offenders in the story world, and twice in the end, when he uses it to evaluate the story in the interactional world: keying the story and positioning himself in the social world (Level 3 positioning) contesting the ideologies and practices of discrimination. This frequent reference to colour is in line with prior research which showed that Sudanese refugees have undergone processes of racialisation of their identity while living in Australia (see also Hatoss, 2012).
In this story, Majak positions himself as someone in control and able to stand up against discriminatory practices. However, he later makes the point in the interview that he acted on this particular case because the offender was about to fight him physically. Admittedly, in many cases he ‘just ignores’ the verbal abuse when it happens. His use of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ in the last few lines (‘we are just WORKERS’, line 17–18) positions himself and his fellow workmen on equal footing. Through this positioning, Majak calls for equal treatment and justice. The long account (and its tellability) is attributable to the interlocutor being a trusted insider, a member of the Dinka community. As we have seen in the previous accounts, the process of telling follows a similar structure, and the narrator builds the story from the ground up: describing the context, the actions taken by the participants in the story world, and finally bringing the story to the present time through the act of evaluation (coda) which holds validity outside the personal experience more broadly. This connection with the real world (Level 3 positioning) is a space where narrators express their identity and contest ideologies (Schiffrin, 2006).
The next example (see Excerpt 5) is taken from an interview which was conducted by a white research assistant (outsider) where an insider (cultural facilitator, Jacob) was also present. The interview participants are two male respondents, Alek and Jok. Alek (pseudonym) is a 33-year-old Dinka man who left Sudan in 1987 as one of the ‘’Lost Boys’, a group of unaccompanied minors who fled from Sudan (Hatoss, 2013). He travelled to Ethiopia and then to Kenya where he spent 10 years before arriving in Australia in 2002. He is married with four children. At the time of the interview, he was undertaking a Master’s degree at the local university. He was also employed by a local service provider as a programme co-ordinator for employment. Jok (pseudonym) is single and is Alek’s cousin. He also arrived in Australia as one of the Lost Boys, via Ethiopia and Kenya. He settled in Australia in 2007 and at the time of the interview he was studying at the university. In this excerpt, the discussion takes place about how people relate to African refugees in the local community. Alek talks about discrimination in the workplace (see Excerpt 5).
Excerpt 5: ‘We have to live with it’
In Excerpt 5, Alek starts off by explaining that racism happens generally (I think generally there is, line 2) which is confirmed by Jok (line 5). Alek makes the evaluative statement in the first-person plural: ‘we have to live with it’ (line 8), implying he speaks for the whole community. His account is a generic response, and he states that he personally has not experienced racism but evokes everyday racism through people’s reference to black people in the street as ‘that black person’ or ‘that black nigger’ or ‘NEGROES’ (line 17) as something naturalised and not to worry about. He also makes an explicit parallel with experiences of black people in America (we know the history of black people in America (.) it’s similar thing, line 17). Then, he makes the point that racism does not only happen in Australia and argues that Australia is a good country (line 18). He uses self-repair in switching from the personal pronoun ‘we’ which would identify him with Australians to the third person inanimate pronoun ‘it’ to refer to Australia as a country instead. This self-correction in reference exemplifies the identity struggles of South Sudanese who are seen as outsiders even after living many years in Australia (Hatoss, 2012, 2013). It is also evidencing his identity positioning strategy in the interactional world, in the interview setting (Level 2 positioning). He contrasts minorities with the majority and states that minorities are ‘squeezed in any community’ (line 20). He builds his counter-story by drawing on a hypothetical narrative of an Australian going to Sudan, where the local people would be singling them out and making remarks about their clothing and their eating habits (line 14). He explains that such white person in South Sudan would be referred as ‘Kawayia’ (line 12–13), a prompt which is given by the white research assistant first. Kawaiya refers to the people with white skin who do not belong. In this account, he positions himself as someone who will not put up with personal racist attacks, while he portrays the broader community (using the referring plural pronoun we) as vulnerable and lacking agency in dealing with such everyday racism and discrimination. He comes to Australia’s defence by drawing a parallel between how white people may be treated in Sudan (hypothetical narrative) and the way Australia treats others. He also protects Australia’s image by referring to other communities stating: ‘I will not say it’s only Australia’ (line 19).
What do these narratives tell us?
As we have seen, the way participants manage their narratives is telling us a great deal about their identity positionings according to all three levels of positioning: in the story world, in the interactional world and in the real world. The narratives have demonstrated that participants experienced racism and verbal abuse in various contexts (the story world). In their narratives (in the interactional worlds of the interview), however, they positioned themselves vis-à-vis these incidents in two ways: (i) mitigating the racist attacks and (ii) drawing on their refugee journey as a source of resilience. In these narratives, there were many occasions where participants expressed a denial of racism (van Dijk, 1992) and spoke out to defend Australia as ‘very very accepting’ and a multicultural country which is built on equal opportunity. Such denials were used to mitigate the narratives and to protect their identity as immigrants who adjust well to the broader social milieu (Level 3 positioning). Nevertheless, their personal experiences reveal that such myths hide the fact that Australia is still a highly racialised space (Augoustinos and Every, 2010; Hatoss, 2023). Participants’ accounts were embedded in broader generic narratives of racism as an anomaly, something that does not normally happen. Findings in this study are in line with other studies that highlight that African blackness is embedded in hegemonic discourses which inscribe blackness in contradiction to whiteness (Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017). Indeed, downplaying the consequences of racism as ‘it doesn’t bother me’ or ‘I ignore it’ serves the function of minimisation and denial. It is mobilised as a coping mechanism, a self-preservation strategy resisting the impact of racist attacks and rendering them as powerless (Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo, 2017).
In terms of the discursive strategies of positioning the self, participants portrayed themselves as grateful to the Australian government. In their narratives, they used intertextuality (direct speech animating others) as the main strategy to make their stories more authentic, credible and lifelike. The intertextual nature of their narratives was also evidenced by their frequent references to their prior refugee journey. They also added their explicit evaluative comments to emphasise the legitimacy of their feelings. These strategies helped them make sense of what happened not only for themselves, but also for the interlocutors involved. The findings of this study contribute to current research on racism in refugee contexts that takes an important shift to the exploration of racism from the victim’s perspectives. In terms of narrative as social practice, the study highlights the discursive strategies that participants mobilised to express their positioning both towards to story told and the listener in the interview setting. They also deployed a range of strategies to mitigate their claims or accusations that racism occurs in Australia. To some extent, they engaged in a discursive denial of wrongdoing by others to project a positive self as a resilient and grateful migrant.
Conclusion
This paper has provided examples of elicited narrative discourse from South-Sudanese refugees in Australia. The accounts provide evidence of everyday racism as occurring in their lives. Yet, their accounts are constructed as balanced by protecting Australia’s image as a welcoming country while voicing incidents of racist attacks. Participants used a variety of discursive strategies to mitigate their stories and to minimise the impact of racism on their lives. These mitigation strategies included momentary references to hard times in Africa entextualised as chronotopic shifts. By drawing on their past refugee experience, participants were able to evaluate their current life circumstances from a more resilient stance. They also downplayed the emotional impact of the incidents on their wellbeing and went as far as denying such an impact.
Nevertheless, their stories were deemed tellable in the interview. The interview context provided narrators with the opportunity to give voice to these experiences in a safe place and share those with trusted individuals (in group and outgroup members) who can make these accounts heard by broader audiences (such as the readers of this paper). In terms of narrative as performed in the interactional space of the interview, these accounts provided examples of discourse strategies that participants used to make their story tellable, authentic, but non-confrontational. Authenticity was achieved through intertextuality (directly quoting others), while ‘tellability’ was achieved through the careful mitigation of the stories and downplaying the emotional impact of racist attacks. These narratives provide a unique insight into interfaces of self and society and constitute a ‘crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities’ (Ochs and Capps, 1996, 19). The narratives presented in this paper demonstrate that narrators are not simply positioned by ‘out-there structures’, but they mobilise their agency to ‘select, resist and revisit positions’ (Georgakopoulou, 2007, p. 123) assigned to them. These narratives provide an invaluable tool for understanding how migrant (especially refugee) communities negotiate membership in their new community. Most importantly, narratives give a voice to minorities and other underrepresented/socially isolated communities to author their own versions of their experiences (De Fina and Tseng, 2017). The voices presented here implicitly call for social intervention to improve their settlement experiences, especially in Australia’s more remote and regional communities.
Footnotes
Appendix: Transcription conventions
Discourse transcription conventions
↓ falling intonation
↑ rising intonation
(. . .) a longer pause approx. 0.5 seconds or longer
(.) a micro-pause approx. less than 0.1 seconds
: extension or prolongation of a sound
:: longer extension or prolongation of a sound
// overlapping utterances
= continuous utterances (latching)
italics emphasis
CAPITALS stressed pitch or volume
‘. . .’ quoting others’ words
(()) editorial comments
Akol: speaker turn attribution
Wor- truncated/cut-off word
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank the participants who gave their time and shared their precious personal stories in the interviews. I would also like to express my gratitude to the numerous research assistants, who supported the research project either by conducting interviews, acting as cultural facilitators or by transcribing the interviews and the Australian research Council for funding the project. I am grateful to the reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier version of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project. Project reference DP0881753.