The Iranian Diaspora in Sydney: Migration Experience of Recent Iranian Immigrants

Recent research has found that discrimination against Islam and Muslims is deeply rooted in Australia. This report explores whether or how recent Iranian migrants have experienced racism, discrimination, or Islamaphobia in Sydney. These questions are explored by focusing on their experiences and issues regarding their making of new lives in Australia. This article suggests that recent Iranian migrants are experiencing far less discrimination than other Muslim diasporas in Sydney. Concluding that despite recent reports by some researchers grouping various Muslim populations together as regards Islamaphobia, there is a necessity for investigating discrimination, stereotyping, and Islamaphobia against particular diasporas to determine the needs of the Muslim population at large.     

Making Sense of Law and Disorder

This article tells the story of a cross‐cultural encounter on a beach at King George’s Sound in the south west of Australia in 1826, when Major Edmund Lockyer arrived to establish a British military garrison. The account we have of those early encounters come from the pen of Lockyer, and by taking a close reading of his journal this article attempts to reveal the meanings and context of Aboriginal actions. It also analyses how the Aborigines and the British made sense and subsequently responded to the encounter. Whilst this story is not given iconic status in Australian historiography, it is valuable in opening up a porthole into this contact zone at the moment when precarious relationships were being formed.     

The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)

This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of labor that tends to over determine Blackness within critical theories. Two visual fields help me with this counter read: William Gerrard De Brahm's 1757 “Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia”, as well as Julie Dash's 1991 images of the porous indigo‐stained hands of former slaves who worked indigo in the film Daughters of the Dust. While these two images oppose one another, their visual conventions enable a break with colonial and humanist scopic regimes like “Black labor” that tend to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor.