The decades since the seminal writings of Aileen Morton-Robinson on whiteness (2000, 2000/2021, 2013, 2015) are marked with a significant body of contributions by Australian scholars that can be broadly summarised as a call to acknowledge Indigenous sovereignty—to expose the subtle ways in which racism operates to maintain the dominance of whiteness across Australia’s political, social, cultural and academic spheres. Yet, inherent in the indispensable work against the invisibility of whiteness as an essentialist position, the use of binary terms such as coloniser/colonised and black/white have become standard reference points of positionality demarcation for non-Indigenous scholars. While academics who identify as non-white and non-Indigenous are indeed complicit in ‘whiteness’ in the Australian context (Pugliese, 2010), either/or binaries based on ‘black or white’ co-ordinates can in fact reinforce ‘whiteness’ as an essentialist position, threatening to obscure the complexities of cultural biography and foreclosing further discussion. We argue that the value in making (our) invisible outsider/insider, color-elastic positionalities visible is in making room for authentic reflection on positionalities from which to ‘fall out of perspective’ and into the space of Indigenous self-determination within research (Nicoll, 2004b: 17; Shim, 2018). What we share reflects our own struggles in understanding and articulating our place, role and responsibilities in contemporary Australia, and is part of ongoing exploration into identity and positionality in the context of contemporary academic conventions.
Introduction
neither the One… nor the Other… but something else besides
Bhabha (2012: 41)
I am, therefore, I am positioned. Social science researchers today understand this automatic condition of investigation. As Walter (2019: 65) puts it succinctly,
Who we are socially, economically, culturally and racially, and who we think we are across those dimensions, underpins the research questions we see, the answers we seek, the way we go about seeking those answers and the interpretations we make, and the theoretical paradigms that make ‘sense’ to us.
Critically recognizing and reflecting upon one’s positionality, especially when researching with Indigenous peoples and communities, is essential to acknowledging the long-lasting damage and pain that paternalistic research methodologies and attitudes have caused and perpetuated for Indigenous peoples. Articulations of positionality are also an important hermeneutic tool for readers, informing the ways in which statements can be interpreted, and clarifying the realms within which and from which a writer can respectfully speak. Positionality contextualizes both research and the researcher. Positionality protocol reminds us then, that knowledge is always held by relationally-situated people in particular places and times. Who holds and shares knowledge can be as constitutive of knowledge as its contents, because knowledge and selfhood are entwined; furthermore, experience lends credibility and integrity to what is said, while sharing knowledge can be an ethical-relational act.
A researcher within the social sciences who is not of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent might begin to understand and articulate their positionality by reference to the postcolonial literature, whose seeds were planted by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903/2018), Frantz Fanon (1967), and later, Edward Said (1978), Spivak (2010) and Bhabha (2012). While each has contributed uniquely to decolonizing discourse, these thinkers are united in their attempts to articulate the nuanced implications of colonialism on the colonized, colonizer, and on cross-cultural relationships. More recently, Puch-Bouwman (2014:410) has identified a range of ‘theory-practice positions’ in Australian Indigenous studies research that researchers may identify with, adapt or transition across, including: Indigenous intellectual sovereignty, decolonizing research, postcolonialism, anti-colonialism, counter-colonialism, whiteness studies, or settler colonial studies. Each of these positions “constitute higher-level symptoms and strategies for dealing with the still-colonial condition of Indigenous-related research” (2014:410). Puch-Bouwman’s ultimate imperative is toward the adoption of “rectificatory positions” that promote “resistance, trans-generational justice and reparation” (Puch-Bouwman, 2014). Regardless of where one explicitly locates oneself and/or is located by reference to theory-praxis, consciousness of one’s positionality is a precondition for operating ethically within Indigenous studies research (and beyond) today.
1
This situation raises questions about the conceptual tools and language we have for articulating positionality, and so identity, in authentic ways. Binary language that takes white and black as primary compass points for identity positioning may not always allow for authentic articulations of positionality for researchers who identify as non-white and non-black, black and white, variations of Indigenous identities, and so on.
Over twenty years ago, Ann Curthoys (2000) brought to important focus the ‘uneasy’ relation between two strands of Australian national discourse: attitudes and policies toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders; and attitudes and policies toward non-Anglo immigrants to Australia. The standard conventions of current positionality discourse suggest that this relation is still uneasy: the interactions of non-majority migrants and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are often mediated, if not obscured, by colonial (white/black) logic. Non-majority migrant communities can find themselves implicated in ongoing forms of the colonial narrative (Pugliese, 2010), though these dynamics are challenged when migrant communities engage affirmatively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander struggles, such as when South-East Asian community members in Sydney advocated for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia’s 2023 referendum (‘Desis for Yes’, see Kaul, 2023; Rachwani, 2023). Such advocacy was infused with a sense of solidarity stemming from shared experiences of British colonization (Vyas in Kaul, 2023; Rachwani, 2023). But while the immigrant body in Australia is indeed complicit in the colonial project and occupies in various degrees “‘white’ locations” (Haggis, 2004:50), to declare only this undisputed fact neglects a more concerning and curious situation: cultural biographies corralled into binary arrangements of identity are only acknowledged by reference to their relative privileged positionality in, or to, whiteness. The array of implications that can be derived, investigated and explored in ‘hybrid’ identities (Ang, 2001) is ignored. We argue here that awareness of the political and socio-cultural relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with migrants who are of non-exclusively-Anglo descent, and the complexities of these identities, is often yet to penetrate the language of positionality discourse in Australia, which relies on identity configurations founded a on simplistic logic of ‘either–or’. Philosophically, such logic relies on the ‘law of excluded middle’, according to which it is either true or false that I am white, but it can never be both true and false. At times and in certain contexts, this logic threatens to repeat an underlying essentialism that conceives identity as static, defined and unchanging, exhausted by identifiers such as ‘black’ or ‘white’ (even if these can also carry symbolically density), or to implicitly assume that ‘non-Indigenous’ equates with ‘Anglo’ heritage (the latter tending to imply British and/or Western European heritage, though such assumptions are themselves problematic, as our reflections below will show). Such an approach implicitly corrals and obscures complex identities by forcing those who are non-white and non-Indigenous into an uncomfortable and ill-fitting binary.
2
Applying such limited logic to positionality discourse also seems to confuse the purpose of positionality statements to begin with. These are intended to bring to light the nuances of experience to contextualise research through self-reflection and awareness (which cannot be gained without genuine encounters of difference); instead, ‘confessing’ one’s (non-Indigenous = white) identity can seem to be an attempt at atoning for one’s positionality. Assertions of positionality can also seem (for non-Indigenous writers) to have become a mechanism for articulating simple lines of in/out group identity, and for legitimizing one’s speech within racially complex contexts, yet without involving reflection on the assumptions that underpin positionality language. Such mechanisms can then corral identities shaped by colour-elasticity into ‘white’ locality.
We are not saying that current positionality language is always unable to fulfil its ethical imperative to problematize colonial residues within non-Indigenous research. Whiteness studies, for example, aims to expose and undermine the dominance of whiteness and relies on articulating identity positions with binary (white/black) language. Ruth Frankenberg’s well-cited trade definition of whiteness as involving ‘structural advantage’, a ‘[white] standpoint’ and ‘cultural practices that are usually unmarked and un-named’ (1993:1) extends any simplistic or face-value understanding of whiteness to reveal much broader mechanisms within the workings of societies. In Australia, this approach to whiteness has served a critical role in delimiting white perspective and elevating Indigenous views, as evident in publications on the surreptitious operation of whiteness across research, disciplinary discourse and within various aspects of society (see for example: Shaw, 2011 on whiteness in urban geography; Bennett, 2019 on whiteness in social work research; Kelen, 2005 on whiteness in the Australian national anthem; Marks, 2022 on whiteness in the Australia criminal justice system; Sriprakash et al., 2022 on whiteness in Australian education). That is, critical discourse on whiteness signals a pivotal, logical and fruitful way for academia to unsettle its settler position within Australian race relations. Following this, Nicoll’s proposition of ‘falling out of [white] perspective’ into an embodied awareness of ‘being in Indigenous sovereignty’ (2004b: 17) offers a potent summary of the whiteness studies approach to positionality. Nicoll and other scholars (Haggis, 2004; Pratt et al., 2000; Shore, 2001) argue that any effort to improve race relations through acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty requires a positionality that regularly and critically acknowledges its exercise of white privileges.
That said, in the early 2000s, and in response to the 1990s proliferation of identity politics, Ien Ang (2001) was already arguing for a shift in social science research discourse from an ‘either–or’ logic of identity, to the recognition that ‘neither–nor’ and ‘both–and’ logics are essential to authentic expressions of both self and others. At the same time, Lynette Russell, of Wotjabaluk descent, was arguing along similar lines (2001, 2002, 2005; Fee and Russell, 2007): ‘For me,’ she wrote, ‘the binaries of Indigenous/non-Indigenous, native/newcomer, even colonizer/colonized are meaningless … most people are not so easily labelled by one or other of these simple categories’ (Russell in Fee and Russell, 2007: 189). Russell does not purport to speak for all Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders—but her insight does not need to be universally generalizable to be valuable as a potent critique of the entrenched and pervasive binary logic of popular positionality discourse.
By autoethnographic reflection below, we share dimensions of our own experience that seek to expand current perspectives, demonstrating the impact that popular positionality language can have on those who do not fit neatly within its parameters. Neither of us have Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage; we have both worked in collaboration with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues, co-researchers and friends; and we both seek to honestly acknowledge our positionality, being sure that this requires more than a smattering of self-descriptive adjectives in our writing. What we share reflects our own struggles in understanding and articulating our place, role and responsibilities in contemporary Australia, and is part of our ongoing exploration of identity and positionality within contemporary academic institutions and conventions.
We recognise autoethnography’s limitations—that autoethnographers can fail ‘to recognize the ideological generalization’ that occurs in ‘identifying self’ (Shim, 2018: 4), and that self-referential research might be seen as fostering individualistic approaches to truth. But there is often also a vulnerability and an intimacy in sharing one’s own story that is hard to replicate in less personal forms of academic writing. Authoethnography utilizes storytelling and human connection for understanding and teaching (Lapadat, 2017). To extend this further, collaborative autoethnography builds on autoethnography’s strengths while addressing some of its potential ethical fault lines. Collaborative ethnography can be a form of collective action for change, building trust and fostering egalitarian relationships (Lapadat, 2017).
The experiences we describe below are far from unique or novel, but we add our voices to the collective insistence, articulated so poignantly by Ang and Russell, that we must acknowledge the ambiguity and the complexity of our own identities if we are to do any justice to the selfhood of others. The ways we invoke positionality, and the language we use to describe it (explicitly or tacitly), needs to reflect these complexities in a manner that prioritizes an ethic of respect, recognition and enigma, rather than a politics of demarcation, reduction and closure. Ang suggests that the notion of ‘hybridity’ offers a more elastic approach to understanding identity, but we are less concerned here with advocating specific terminologies (such as ‘hybridity’, which has also been problematized [see Haggis, 2004]), than in offering an open space of creative intervention, intended to add resources to the current conceptual toolbox. We recognize, of course, that we are positioned—as indeed are our interpretations of our positions. This is a constitutive dimension of being human. Our relational, political and ethnic positions all shape our perspectives and our writing—as do our literal socio-geographic positions, especially in a country as large as Australia. We are based in urban (Elinor) and urban-rural fringe (Sarah) settings around the city of Melbourne. How far our observations can, with integrity, extend within and beyond our own localities and the diverse cultural dynamics therein, is a question for each reader to decide. But we hope that aspects of what we share—particularly in relation to themes of inclusion, elasticity and recognition—will entice further critical development of the ways positionality is understood and articulated in the context of research.
Reflections on positionality
Elinor
Shore (2001: 42) states that ‘talking about whiteness is risky business, theoretically, politically, and practically’. The following account of my identity/positionality in relation to whiteness is also a risky business emotionally. First, because such personal exposure does not adhere to the status quo of separating the ‘personal’ from the ‘professional’, or of reducing positionality to an acknowledgment of white privilege and compliance in the colonial project. Second, the content may invite accusations of self-victimization or self-spotlighting. Yet, if the purpose of positionality is to advance decolonized research and improve race-relations, it needs to be authentic—and authenticity, at least in this context, requires a certain level of exposure. Detailed reflection emphasizes the arrayed possibilities of positionality within research, of which the following account is but one example.
I identify as a Jewish Mizrachi woman, an immigrant with Jewish Moroccan and Libyan heritage. I am also an Israeli and a Melbournian Australian. I am non-white/non-black. Rather than reflecting a binary approach to identity, the way I describe my position questions the value, and even the possibility, of defining myself by reference to two ‘primary’ colours. I visualise my identity as circular. That is, these varied above-mentioned identity-markers, some older and longer-lasting than others, move together, shifting their positions depending on context and location. I reconcile inner and outer perceptions of myself by locating my identity as a shifting permanent identity. Life experience has taught me that others tend to perceive me as permanently located in one or two (although it is never the same one or two) of these circles. For example, waiting to check-in for an international flight in Melbourne airport, I am conscious of myself phenotypically as neither-white-nor-black in the context of the swirling crowds. Once I hand in my passport and answer questions in accented English, I am both an Australian and an immigrant. Upon arrival in Israel, my Moroccan-Mizrachi position means that I am non-black in relation to my father’s Ethiopian Jewish neighbor, and I am non-white when I visit my Ashkenazi Jewish family-friend. Although the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ are no longer commonly used in Israel (unlike in my father’s generation), the remnants of their hierarchical meanings persist with varying intensities based on socio-economic status and geographical location.
Upon return to Australia, while undertaking fieldwork on Gundijtimara Country with my collaborators, the identity politics that makes selective difference visible also makes it unthinkable for any of us to see me as black. Simultaneously, conversations that emerge reveal that, because of individual and collective experiences of otherness, none of us view me as white either. And the same-but-different locality of non-white/non-black holds within the academic corridors of my employment, where I am out-of-sync with selection criteria for academic jobs and metrics of diversity that are reproduced but rarely reflected upon (see for example, Blair-Loy et al., 2023). I reject the ‘in-between’ identity marker because it risks implying that its inhabitants lack a definitive identity, perpetually existing in a ‘neither here nor there’ (form of double otherness) coloured-dominated space. A ‘non-between’ marker in contrast, while still anchored in a binary logic, may be more effective in establishing an identity that resides in a fluid, ever-shifting state while retaining a sense of wholeness. Rather than a pick-and-choose attitude, the ‘non-between’ resists a blind echo of a selective identity politics, highlighting instead the complexities of any contemporary identity.
I find the ‘non-Indigenous’ category in academic discourse challenging because it forces me into a non-authentic positionality within research with Indigenous peoples. While it recognizes my status as a beneficiary of the colonial project, it makes invisible my historical collective and individual experiences of genocide, oppression, colonialism, racism and discrimination. My research is a non-Indigenous contribution to the field of decolonized research, but as such, it also often feels like an unwilling contribution to an essentialist view of the field where the dichotomy of ‘Indigenous or non-Indigenous’ is taken to mean ‘black or white’—an outcome in which the contributions of various epistemic registers are ironically rendered invisible, leaving my works’ whiteness as the primary marker of its contribution to wider discourse, and further enforcing a white mask (Fanon, 1967) upon my non-white skin.
Alluding to this risk in the context of education, Shore (2001: 42) explains that talking about whiteness ‘runs the risk of reifying and privileging the (white) self at the very same time when social theorizing promotes understandings of identity as complex, historical, contingent, and located’. Talking about whiteness implicates my hand in whiteness while selectively whitening my whole body—selectively, because outside the researcher’s role, I am a Middle Eastern immigrant—which, on a continuum of Australian identity, translates to more privileged than, not as privileged as. At the same time, if I submit my identity to the binary logic of ‘either–or’, I should (according to the perception of Israelis as colonizers) be granted a membership at the club of the Anglo-Saxon scholars. Evidently, I hold no such membership; or, more accurately, I am offered a seasonal membership depending on the club’s calendar of events. Either as an Australian immigrant or ‘only’ as a ‘colonizing Jew’, my non-Indigenous positionality within research differs from my non-Indigenous positionality within Australian society, creating an identity forced to contradict itself—or at the very least, hide itself within the research context. This means that the contemporary binary language of the decolonized research space colonizes non-white and non-black positionalities, and in doing so contradicts the ideal goal embedded in its name.
I do not speak on behalf of the Indigenous collaborators on the research projects in which I participate. While their agreement to engage with research on organizational, communal and individual levels validates its value, my racial identity is not central to the project’s fruition. I was born into a lengthy Jewish collective history of persecution, oppression, antisemitism and genocide, having lost friends in wars and family members in terrorist acts, and have witnessed Australian academic colleagues’ calls to boycott new knowledge due to the politics of the state from which it is generated. I have been able to empathize with the never-identical, but also painful collective and individual experiences of my Indigenous collaborators. As a member of a state that has a shadow-side (like all states) in relation to both its Jewish and Arab-Israeli minorities—including with settlements on disputed territories—and as an immigrant accepted into Australia by the reigning colonial government, I am able to recognize and acknowledge my privileged embodied state. This variegated positionality has made me a different kind of actor within the research space—one who simultaneously can and cannot understand the positionalities and experiences of the Indigenous collaborators—or perhaps who connects with these positionalities and experiences in a particular and complex way. Not surprisingly, many of my Indigenous collaborators—whether elders, key important people or participants—have recognized my Jewishness as signifying experiences of othering, while it has triggered others to speak candidly about the complexities within their own Indigenous identities. Given the importance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in contemporary multicultural Australia, future research into the role non-white/non-Indigenous researchers’ socio-cultural positioning might play in the dynamics of collaborative research is both relevant and valuable for the development of current understanding about decolonised research practices.
In the context of my research work, exploring Australian Indigenous scholarship on whiteness (Moreton-Robinson, 2000/2021, 2013, 2000) has revealed the hold of whiteness, as a socio-political structure, on my positionality. I proposed a research project to Indigenous communities as a representative of a western institution whose funding position translated to certain dominance over structure and process—such as in gaining ethics approval, and limiting the time spent on building relationships and trust (see Assoulin, 2023). On an individual level, I offered the collaborators a project that utilizes art therapy—a western way of knowing that risks pathologizing the Indigenous participants as needing ‘therapy’. Yet my readings on the ways in which whiteness can work to maintain its interests as superior has also illuminated childhood experiences of being on the ‘other side’. For example, I recall reciting a well-rehearsed false home address so that I could attend a primary school in the richest part of my hometown neighborhood, where most students were Ashkenazi (not Mizrachi, like me). I recall countless formal and informal interactions where the first part of my surname has been emphasized to imply my Mizrachi less-than, uncultured status. And I recall my father taking part in protests, holding a sign that read ‘Enough of Black Discrimination’. At the same time, the differences I felt to others in the Jewish community were softer and smaller in scale and depth to those felt by my father, which, coupled with current trends showing reduced disparities between the two groups, suggests that improvement in acceptance of hybrid identities is possible. The critical point is that these differences, usually described using Mizrachi-Ashkenazi terminology— with Jewishness as the common denominator—offer both similarities and differences to black-white binary language. This dual embodied understanding of structural whiteness cannot place me in the same unlearning of whiteness that many non-Indigenous Australian scholars speak of (Nicoll, 2000, 2004a, 2004; Pratt et al., 2000).
While the 1990s saw the Israeli academy forging its path with whiteness—from an issue of ethnicity and culture to a racial social category depicting a privileged position in society (Pappé, 2021)—Mizrachi Jews, likely due to a combination of discrimination and identification with the black branch of the civil rights movement in the US, took on the ‘black’ descriptor at least two decades earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s, as most evident in the Israeli Black Panthers movement (Bernstein, 1984; Frankel, 2020). Yet color-identification is never an entirely independent choice, as evident, for example, in the denigration by Zionists of Jews who do not follow their ideology as ‘inferior blacks’ (see Blum, 2002). Further, although not neatly equivalent with ‘white possessive logic’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), the term ‘Mizrachi’ has been advocated for in an academic context ruled by Zionist ideology to emphasize ‘religious commonality and a romanticized past’ (Pappé, 2021:128), even though Mizrachi scholars use the term ‘Arab Jew’ to emphasize their ethnic Arab identity. Shohat (2017) points out that the ‘Mizrachi’ nomination produces one homogenous identity (Jewish) separated from the Islamic world, but it also maintains a ‘less-than’ Mizrachi position through social construction that rests on geographical hierarchy. While the contemporary locality of Mizrachi Jews on the white-black scale has shifted upwards (or towards its own version of ‘white-wards’), variations of past constructions as hot-tempered, aggressive, incompetent and backward (Dorchin and Djerrahian, 2020) still play out within Mizrachi-Ashkenazi social constructions. Levine-Rasky (2013) argues that overall, the misfit between Jewish ethnicity, whiteness and antisemitism underscores the need for nuanced understandings of identity and the limitations of simplistic racial categorizations in capturing the diverse experiences of individuals and communities.
After the heinous attacks in Israel on 7th October 2023, certain expressions of outrage at Israel’s response have ignorantly attempted to whiten my whole body with a headless binary logic, equating ‘white’ with oppressor. A selective dynamic emerges where the persecution and dispersal of my family in Morocco, the Holocaust of my people, the racism I have experienced in Australia and even my olive complexion, among other markers, evaporate from my identity—magically producing a (selective) white colonist. But being automatically associated with a colonizing ethno-state (Israel) fails to take account of the ethnic/cultural discrimination my family and I have experienced as Jews at the hands of other Jews in Israel itself—not to mention our experiences in Morocco and Libya. No convenient whitewashing can remove the truth of those experiences—experiences that without the ‘Jewish’ marker would undoubtedly locate me as the ‘Other’ (and therefore, as black, or at least blackish). Currently in Australia, particularly on university grounds, I, as Jewish (and Moroccan and Libyan, and as Mizrachi), feel pressured to disavow Israel to align with a politicized perspective on Indigenous sovereignty issues. Supporting Indigenous sovereignty is, in some quarters, equated with (or is implied to necessitate) an anti-Israel stance. The assumed Indigenous-Palestinian alliance is particularly concerning because it reflects another variation of binary logic where colonialism (so, colonised and coloniser) are overlaid, in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, on conflicts that these terms do not cover neatly. Critically, it once again reproduces a situation where privileged white individuals attempt to decide alliances for all Indigenous Australians.
Jewish and Israeli students and staff at my workplace, myself included, have faced explicit and implicit threats during demonstrations against the current Gaza war. The demonstrations, justified by freedom of speech, are a powerful example of how blunt attempts to defy racism can become racist themselves. As an Israeli whose family has experienced intergenerational persecution, who has faced ethnic discrimination in my own state (as Mizrachi) and who also identifies with that state (I am Mizrachi Jewish and Israeli)—while working in decolonized research—my position highlights the limitations and crudeness of uninformed binary positionality demands.
The highlighted complexities relating to both the individual and collective aspects of my identity, especially the Israeli dimension and how this is perceived by others, indicates that while unlearning my privileged position as an immigrant and researcher remains essential, I also draw on unique experiences as a non-white individual to unlearn my whiteness. I do not claim that invoking greater nuance and complexity into positionality discourse by naming non-white/non-Indigenous positionalities can act as a panacea that bridges race relations in Australia, nor that it is a game changer for decolonized research. I do propose that voicing positionalities of color-elasticity stretches the space of decolonized research, which at the very least enriches the processes and meanings associated with ‘falling out of perspective’ (Nicoll, 2004b: 17). Future research is needed to explore the implications of a focus on the value of color-elasticity in academic discourse for articulating positionality. It should employ multiple methodological approaches in the exploration of research positionality, including those that allow for blurred researcher-participant roles. This should not be done within an abstract, unifying humanist framework, but rather with an inclusive attitude toward the pursuit of new knowledge. Being open and honest about our diverse positionalities is essential for embodying authenticity within the concept of positionality. It is this authenticity—rather than any particular identity label—that enables the researcher’s task of asking deeper questions of relationality and ethics, and engaging in complex hermeneutic work and “deep listening” (see Brearley, 2014; Ungunmerr-Baumann and Brennan, 1989). Such pathways may enrich understanding and advance the practices of decolonized research—while a pitfall to avoid will be the creation of an ‘immigrant-researcher’ category with its own essentialist characteristics to form some version of a trilogy-logic.
Sarah
‘Australia’s diversifying diversity is obvious in its cities, and Australians carry layers of nested, multiple, and sometimes contradictory, identities, contained within overlapping and intersecting categories of difference that state agencies struggle to disentangle.’ (Malhi, 2024:5)
I grew up in the 1990s in the most culturally diverse municipality of Australia (City of Greater Dandenong, n.d.)—also one of the most disadvantaged areas in the state of Victoria—with a mother who fluently spoke three languages (English her third) and a migrant father who had arrived in Australia from India when he was 19-years-old. As a child, differences of skin color and features, language, food and customs were so normal that, while they registered, they signified nothing more than the normal human differences of everyday life (Bacaller, 2023). I didn’t learn to define myself or even think of myself by reference to skin color, which was due partly to my childhood naivety, and partly due to the multicultural nature of the communities in which I grew up (I knew nothing different). However, my mother’s cousins have told stories of post-war migration racism in my suburb of birth; they bore the brunt of this racism, softening the blow for those of us who came a generation later.
I understood my identity by reference to my Anglo-Indian father and my multi-lingual mother; my Catholic Hungarian grandfather; my East-German grandmother; my Anglo-Indian grandparents, aunts and uncles—as well as by reference to my Czech best friend, my newly-migrated Sri Lankan ‘big brother’ (who lived with us for half a decade), and my British, Sri Lankan, Turkish, Vietnamese and Aboriginal school and church friends. This diversity contributed to a rich tapestry of identity and difference. In that context, there was no advantage or leverage to be gained—at least for us kids—by defining ourselves by skin color (though it may have been different for the adults). Yet, at the same time, people were proud of their cultures, languages, and heritages. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a sense of ‘race’ or were ‘color-blind’ (Apfelbaum et al., 2012); rather, I assumed (because of my own identity and my family’s diversity), that race was always too complicated to be ‘just one thing’, and that race didn’t impact my fundamental humanness in any way. I was too ignorant to interpret differences within global histories of racism. Yet difference was a source of enrichment, not a justification for aggression or separation. And I felt wholeheartedly Australian—proudly so.
My first inkling of a coming disruption came through my obsession with the Australian cricket team. I became acutely aware that I looked different to my heroes and to many of their fans (and not just because I was a girl). The cricketers’ whiteness per se was no problem—after all, my mother and siblings all have ‘white’ skin. In fact, even my Anglo-Indian, blue-eyed grandmother had fair skin—certainly ‘white’ in appearance; but looks can be deceiving. I, however, resembled Sachin Tandulkar and his fans much more than I did Glenn McGrath or Shane Warne. And I desperately feared being seen as ‘less Aussie’ than my cricket-mad compatriots because of my skin color. So, I had some inkling that color made a difference and I mentally resisted this awareness, even as I had also imbibed assimilationist ideology into myself in my desire to be seen as ‘fully Australian’ (read: white—which I really did want to be, until I realized my skin’s resilience against fury of the Australian sun). I also look back on my childhood and realize that the adults within positions of authority in my sphere—the pastors at our church, the teachers at my school—predominantly appeared to be of British descent, which reflects both circumstance and privilege (which is not to assume that they didn’t have their own struggles or identity-complexities, or that my assumptions about their ethnicities are correct).
As I grew up, moved suburbs and moved schools, the vile and frankly bewildering existence of racism dawned upon me. What a rude awakening! While I refused to accept any belittlement directed towards myself, I felt keenly any and every racist comment I heard made toward others. These occurred mostly in the classroom, made usually by uninformed males of my age (and were often left unchecked by teachers). I angrily felt the wrongness of these attitudes with every fiber of my being.
Perhaps as a result, I now experience the definition (even description) of others by reference to color as problematic. I associate it with the racism I encountered in my high school years, which was the first time I heard value judgments made of others based on skin color. I am acutely aware—because of my multi-coloured family—how absurdly little skin color tells us about a person in contemporary Melbourne (where I live), though I recognize that this truth is also highly contextual. I don’t think I am a ‘new abolitionist’; we are not all the same; but I am currently convinced that what difference is, and what appearance signifies, is much more complicated—and perhaps much less complicated too—than any single word can gather.
I may still be in denial or perpetual confusion. But I can call myself neither ‘white’ nor ‘black’ … ‘brown’ perhaps, but that sits awkwardly. These words say so little about who I am, and who my family is. Publication contributor surveys and racially targeted literary competitions disorient me. So do opportunities targeted toward ‘minority groups’. At what point do I count … or not? The categories in pre-fab, drop-down menus rarely allow me to describe myself accurately (although I recently filled in a survey with the most comprehensive list of possible and multiple ethnicities and religious affiliations that I have seen). Also, I’m not sure I want to be given special consideration for ticking certain boxes, because there are others who might need that consideration more than me (I was born in Australia after all); on the other hand, I do now recognize the extra challenges I may have faced because of my appearance. But so far, I have refused to call myself a ‘person of color’ because: (1) what if my self-designation is contested? (maybe I’m not colored enough); and (2) this descriptor implies that there are people of no color (the underlying assumption within the phrase ‘people of colour’), which is just plain absurd considering what color represents (culture, race, heritage, belonging, identity). It is akin to the naïve assertion that one speaks with ‘no accent’ (cf. Frankenburg, 1993). My younger sister, who is just as Anglo-Indian as I am (insofar as we share the same ancestry), has fair skin, Celtic freckles and blue eyes; my brother is similar. They are not ‘POCs’—are they? My siblings may not need to deal with the issues that come with having non-fair skin (like racial profiling in shops, of which I am acutely aware), but judgment of them as ‘simply white’ would be inaccurate, because they are and they aren’t.
If I’m uncertain about color categories, I’m also uncertain about where I fit into Australian race relations. I benefit from colonization because I live in Australia today. I am the descendent on one side of Anglo-Indians—that is, people borne of the entwinement of British colonizers and colonized Indians. My religiously Catholic, culturally Hungarian, ethnically Ashkenazi Jewish grandfather—a refugee to Australia after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—married a village-born East German refugee to Australia less than two decades after World War II. My family is a network of diverse experiences and histories, as are all families. When ‘white’ identities are summarily grouped as privileged colonizers, set in opposition to non-white identities, or when I’m in contexts where the options for identity definition are limited but required, I feel as though I’m being asked to side with one part of my lineage against another, one part of myself against another. Under such circumstances, what does it mean to be honest? To self-describe truthfully?
This level of complexity in identity is not especially unique in Australia, even if each identity itself is unique. Australian journalist Isabella Higgins (2019), of German and Torres Strait Islander descent, frames complex identities in an optimistic way when she highlights family as a key social locale for modelling what it looks like to embrace diversity:
Our family [i.e. Higgin’s own family] doesn’t have labels for each other, no black or white, or half-caste. We’re the walking, breathing proof [that] acceptance, inclusion and respect between black and white Australia is possible … [but] the rest of Australia often struggle to understand us.
Higgins reminds us that Indigenous Australians have been dealing with the frustrations and indignities of imposed identity descriptors for too long. And perhaps there is often a disconnect between academic conventions and the everyday discourse of ‘real life’, where people are dextrously and constantly juggling the complexities of mixed heritage and identity ambiguities all the time—as evident, for example, in research from Israel, the USA and Latin America (Deaux, 2018; Pappé, 2021; Telles and Paschel, 2014; Roberts et al., 2022; Zack, 2010: 884). In my limited experience, even in relational contexts where there is a ‘clear’ demarcation of non-Indigenous identity from an Indigenous perspective—as with ‘kardiya’ in Warlpiri or ‘balanda’ in Dhuwal (Yolŋu) to refer to non-Indigenous individuals (Curkpatrick and Wilfred, 2023; Pawu and Curkpatrick, 2023)—ethnicity and its complexities seem to be taken as a given and integrated into wider notions of identity, which is already always complex, continuous and relational in its interwovenness with Country, rather than being discrete and exclusive (also Curkpatrick, 2024).
3
To be authentic in articulating my positionality within research, I cannot use an ‘either–or’ logic of identity; rather, the logics of ‘both–and’ and ‘neither–nor’ are more fitting (see Ang, 2001: viii). To discover and form who we are requires exploration, testing, learning—and is a continual journey. And while explicit self-designation at a particular moment in time may reveal my ‘positionality’ to some extent, what is more telling are my ongoing attitudes, and my relationships and responsibilities towards and with others, including how this is inscribed and conveyed textually (how do I write others?). Do I write with a presumption that truth is a matter of ‘either–or’? Do I assert my ideas as though they should be adopted absolutely, without reference to the context (positionality) and dignity of readers? Do I reflect upon underlying assumptions and expose myself to the difference in others that reveals those assumptions? Can a person fail to articulate one’s ‘positionality’ in a research article in so many words, while simultaneously demonstrating in a positive sense precisely those aspects of self-awareness that are captured in the very impetus and purpose of positionality discourse? These are my ongoing questions.
Figuring the self: A semantic conundrum
“Racial classification systems are battles over truth. The racial schemas embalmed by the state are both constitutive of and by social worlds.” (Thompson, 2016: 224).
The current protocols of positionality discourse within the academy and in literary contexts, where various terms have become shibboleths, threaten to oversimplify (at best) meaningful complexities of identity. Malbon (1999)—considering the meaning and provision of s51(xxvi) in the Australian Constitution (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022), which asserts the Commonwealth’s authority to enact laws for individuals of any “race” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022)—contends that any literal interpretation of race based on an assumption of objective, straightforward or natural meaning is insufficient. That is, understandings of race are highly relative in time and place, while the often inflammatory nature of racial classifications can have devastating outcomes (Malbon, 1999; Malhi, 2024). Using American dictionaries and the 2000 U.S. Census, Jones (2005) has shown how, in less than a generation, functional definitions of race have shifted in US contexts from being based on physical differences to being understood as a social and political construct.
The Macquarie Dictionary (2016) offers six definitions of race(2) as per Australian usage (2016) that describe race both as the ‘group[ing]’ and/or the ‘differentiation’ of people ‘according to genetically determined characteristics’, and as a descriptor of ‘a group of people sharing a language or culture or traditional beliefs or practices’. While the assumption seems to persist that there is a sound scientifically-determined basis for the biological taxonomization of race (perpetuating influential 18th and 19th century perspectives), in fact no such biological basis exists at a species—or even at a subspecies—level (NIH [US], 2007; UN General Assembly, 1965; Zack, 1993, 2010). There are of course very real social, political and psychological impacts that result from and exist within human groupings (Groothuis, 2020: 6–7). Perhaps concepts of race only serve a purpose when, as Jones proposes, ‘the philosophical ‘end in view’ is to free the term from its negative associations so that it can become instrumental in changing reality for the good’ (2005:619). Jones’s observation recognises that contextual complexities moderate interpretations and applications of the concept of race. But other scholars perceive the idea of race to be wholly an ‘effect of racism’ (Brooks, 2006: 313; also Montagu, 1964), or a tool for maintaining the capitalist and patriarchal status quo (Gaffney, 2018; Thompson, 2016).
The following anecdote bears out the complexities of attempting to articulate racial identity in contemporary Australia. In 2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) announced that it planned to add questions on ethnicity to the national census—for which one of the definable characteristics would be ‘being racially conspicuous’ (ABS, 2019). That this data would be valuable for exploring health outcomes for vulnerable populations, as well as for offering a clearer picture of Australia’s diversity, were among outcomes welcomed by the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia and by the Racial Discrimination Commissioner at the time (Yussuf and Walden, 2022). But scholar Amrita Malhi warned that attempts to collect finely-grained ethnicity data would have to address ‘whether and how to distinguish between ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’’—observing that the latter term ‘carries no practical difference in meaning from the term ‘ethnicity’’ and that therefore, collecting such data could not ‘be distinguished’ from a governmental system of ‘‘racial’ classification’ (Malhi, 2024: 2, 17).
4
As a result of state-driven attempts to collate such data, Malhi pointed out, complex questions would have to be addressed—such as: ‘What is an ethnic group? What is a culture? What ‘races’ should [different ethnicities or cultures] be grouped into? Where are the boundaries between these concepts?’—and importantly, ‘Who will adjudicate?’ (Malhi, 2022, emphasis added). In the context of the Australian census, these questions are all the more complex because they need to be answered not just in ways that satisfy the conventions of academic discourse, but in ways that make sense to the diverse lived experiences of all Australians (who, after all, will be the ones answering census questions).
In 2023, however, the ABS rescinded their decision, announcing it would not add ‘ethnicity’ questions to the census after all (reverting to questions of ‘ancestry’)—thus affirming Malhi’s practical insights (Malhi, 2024).
5
This disappointed those who argued for the inclusion of this data on health grounds (Priest, Gallagher in Yussuf, 2024)—and who felt that, without recognition of ethnic diversity, the existing phraseology of census questions could be perceived as ‘whitewash[ing]’ (Allen in Chang, 2023). But the ABS explained that, based on their initial testing, ‘the public is unlikely to have a consistent understanding of what ethnic identity is’ (ABS, 2023). When working with sample populations, and despite providing specific definitions, the diversity of ways in which ‘ethnicity’ questions were interpreted by participants was simply too great to yield consistent findings (ABS, 2023; Yussuf, 2024). Indeed, the ABS could not find a ‘single measure’ to ‘represent the multi-dimensional nature of the concept of ethnicity’ (Yussuf, 2024). Perhaps this difficulty reflects the fact that not only do Australians experience and understand race, ethnicity and identity in diverse ways, from different positions, but that the very breadth and gradation in the concept of ethnicity itself reflects this ‘superdiversity’ (Malhi, 2024: 3; Vertovec, 2022).
Scholars have expressed fears that, far from simply describing the nature of reality ‘as it is’, state-endorsed divisions of citizens into ‘ethnic categories’ (Yussuf, 2024) in fact can ‘create, socialise and reify’ these very divisions, ‘racialising populations and interpellating ‘ethnic’ groups in the state’s own interest’ (Malhi, 2024: 3; also Thompson, 2016). That is, in an attempt to recognize and cater to ethnic diversity, the use of discrete, simplified categories (even a large number of them!) can further entrench perceptions of ‘race’ as an transparent, uninterpreted fact. This represents an attempt to ‘freeze the changes in a diverse society to make it easier to read social identities when they are complicated’ (Malhi in Yussuf, 2024). But race does not exist ‘independently of [socio-political] structure’—‘it exists in a dialectical relationship to it’ (Smith, 2018: 95). Embedding racial difference into national discourse risks reifying differences in an essentialist sense and obscuring collective moral responsibility for the production and perpetuation of these categories of difference. Racial divisions are socio-cultural and conceptual, not taxonomically biological (Langton, 1999; NIH [US], 2007; Pritchard, 2011; UN General Assembly, 1965; Zack, 2010).
6
This is not to say that racial divisions are less impactful for that reason, but rather that we must take responsibility for the ethics of social constructs that are perpetuated and the psychological effects these constructs have, whilst also recognising the concrete differences of learned experience (language, location, values, norms, traditions, knowledge, skills, beliefs etc.), and the impacts of phenotypic difference in shaping lived experience.
What are the implications of the above anecdote for positionality discourse, where the expectations for describing one’s positionality are even more basic (colonizer/colonized, white/black) than potential census questions? Perhaps the ABS findings on the diversity of ways in which ethnicity is interpreted reflects a richness and complexity that is not a problem—but is something to which we should lean in. The question then is how we expand current frameworks and language—which are underpinned by classificatory impetuses and the need for discrete boundaries—to cope with the real-life complexities and differences that are part of everyday life, in a manner that integrates but expands the honorable impetuses of positionality language, while moving beyond its limitations and shifting the coordinates of its problematic assumptions.
The value of complexity
If complexities of identity can be a resource rather than a burden in the context of academic research with diverse cultural groups, how might this play out? For Daniela Rodica Ana-Maria Brown (2023)—based in Aotearoa/New Zealand—the complexities of her own identity and her experiences of marginalisation shape a deeply intentional research ethos. Brown (2023) identifies as Romanian and, in her research, shares about her experiences of marginalization as an adoptee from a Romanian orphanage. As a child, she was considered ‘deficent’ by the ‘Soviet science of defectology’ due to a crossed-eye condition. Later experiences of intercountry adoption have included her experience of others’ subtle discontent with language barriers and her olive complexion. Brown also reports an instance where, in the context of research participation as a child, her story was ‘twisted’ and her voice ‘suppressed’ (2023). She draws a direct link between these experiences and her research positionality, stating: ‘I orient my choices to reflect one that dwells in the borders of marginalization, choosing research paradigms that meet with others also on this border’ (2023:2). In the case of Brown then, her experiences of difference shape a self-positioning that intentionally works to ‘humaniz[e] participants through dialogical relationships’ (2023). Brown appears extremely careful to avoid putting others in subjugated positions, precisely because she knows—in an experiential, psychological and somatic sense—how this can feel.
Stine Agnete Sand (2023) challenges the quest for positionality when the outsider/insider dichotomy reduces research and its perceived value to a matter of ethnicity and representations. Her account reflects a personal journey of identity-growth as a Norwegian individual, her marriage to a Sámi partner, her children’s identification as Sámi, experiences of residing in a Sámi community, involvement in filmmaking and research with Sámi women, and a discovery of her own maternal Sámi heritage. Sand urges critical reflection led by questions that reflect on why I position myself and what this implies—which should precede the decision to include (or not) discussion on researcher positionality. Her reflections invite us to realize that a positionality statement is never neutral nor ‘objective’; it does not step outside positionality and is always still positioned and shaped by the limitedness of one’s own perspective. Sand further argues that demands for expressions of positionality through binary language ‘can construct ‘unnatural ethnic borders’’ (2023: 13) that do not harmonize with her identity as an ‘‘inbetweener’ in a Sámi, Indigenous context’ (2023: 1). While both Sand and Brown each address positionality in their own ways, both share experiences of the real-life complexities of identity, enacting an epistemic diversity that enriches meanings of positionality within decolonial research.
In Australia, Krusz et al. (2020) advocate for an iterative process of critical reflection to ensure researchers ‘remain conscious, reflective and appropriately uncomfortable in our positioning in Indigenous spaces and places’ (2020: 213). A recent scoping review on the application of critical discourse analysis by non-Indigenous researchers of discourse relating to Indigenous Australians (McCartan et al., 2022) finds, however, a concerningly high rate of neglected examination of sociocultural positioning by researchers. The aim of such scholarship perhaps justifies the deployment of binary language to discuss positionality. Yet, if we agree on the necessity of critical internal self-reflection in examining the reproduction of settler privilege, we need to stretch both the scope of discussions and the language we use to discuss positionality in all its myriad constructions.
From the perspective of Indigenous scholars such as Yin Paradies (2006) and Lynette Russell (Fee and Russell, 2007), there is a need for new forms of interrogation into the contours of Indigenous identity.
7
These scholars find themselves in ‘in-between’ positions (Fee and Russell, 2007:189) because of an assumed binary choice between ‘Indigenous and non-Indigenous’ identification—a choice they refuse to make. Similarly, Morrissey (2003), Dodson (1994) and Gilroy (1993) have stressed the importance of ensuring the development of an approach to Indigeneity that minimises essentialism and thereby escapes viewing Indigenous identity as a fixed, stationary classification. But Jackie Huggins, a Bidjara and Birri Gubba Juru scholar, views identity fluidity as ‘nothing less than a cop-out and a sell-out of Aboriginal heritage, values and identity’ (2003: 63), in contrast to Indigenous scholars who experience identity as ‘in-between’. The problem with a staunchly fixed position, Paradies (2006) argues, is that it leads to the inevitable construction and policing of clear boundaries between ‘Indigenous and non-Indigenous’ which, as per Ang’s observations, can lead to “a prison house of identity” (Paradies, 2006; Ang, 2001: 11).
It is not up to us here to make statements or judgments about those working hard to articulate what Aboriginal identity means to them today. What is clear is that the adoption of fixedly demarcated and discrete boundaries between simplistic categories is often not sufficient for many individuals navigating the complex terrain of identity-diversity. Wendy Brady, a Wiradjuri scholar, critically and generously reflects that, ‘If as an Aboriginal person I find myself dealing with an array of identities, what can be gleaned about those who are, for me, the other, who go under the general description of ‘white people’?’ (Brady and Carey, 2000: 272). Complexity may feel troublesome, because it can disrupt established protocols—but it can also be embraced. The challenging entanglements of selfhood can nourish valuable perspectives in intercultural research contexts. The recognition and acceptance of complexities of difference and enigmas within ourselves may help us to recognize and appreciate these nuances in others as part of the normalcy of life, bending our energy towards inconvenient resistance to the hegemony of reiterated simplifications.
8
Conclusions
Australian culture has, in general, not sat well with the complexities of both-and identity over the last two-hundred years. The Australian Constitution itself includes (and is founded upon) false understandings of race (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022; Malbon, 1999; Pritchard, 2011). To move beyond historically reinforced socio-cognitive frameworks of essentialism and racial identity requires genuine creativity; these frameworks threaten to persist even by inversion. For those who have experienced oppression, self-identification can be an act of agency and an assertion of freedom; in such a context, to identify as black or as a person of color becomes symbolic of inclusion within past and present communities of solidarity. But when such descriptors are reflected back upon minorities in a restrictive manner, or are deployed—perhaps as repetitive clichés or shibboleths—to deflect deeper levels of critical engagement with complex identities of difference, the agential potential of these descriptors can be inverted, accomplishing precisely the opposite of what they achieve in the mouths of those who are most qualified to speak them.
Here, we have explained why we don’t feel comfortable with the current expectations we face for determining and defining our own identities in particular ways. That is, we have specifically addressed positionality discourse in social studies research in Australia, where we are often railroaded into defining ourselves by reference to racial and phenotypical markers in the context of our work, or as the subjects of research. Where such descriptors are self-adopted vehicles of agency and empowerment, they fulfil an essential function. When they are imposed, and in being imposed, act to silence, obscure and perpetuate the logic of essentialist identity demarcation, there are important questions to be asked—as there are when positionality discourse becomes lip service that distracts from deeper questions of relationality and ethics, which call for complex hermeneutic work and ‘deep listening’ (Brearley, 2014; Ungunmerr-Baumann and Brennan, 1989). We are talking here about the importance of developing critical-contextual awareness (the very impetus of positionality discourse) that considers carefully when descriptors can be deployed with authenticity, and when they become clichés. We trust that our own discomfort with reductive approaches to identity can lead to dialogue and creative innovation that equips us all to use conceptual and linguistic tools with greater skill and with greater integrity. How might we speak of who we are in a way that justly recognizes the constitutive relationships between others and ourselves? We yearn for a more open and generous sharing of nuanced positionalities, and we believe that this can only enrich the notion of positionality within research—and can therefore enrich and further develop decolonized research. After all, we can only understand our own positions relative to—in relationship with—the positions of others; difference positions us and gives us the gift of expanded awareness.
