The fact of the ‘uncommodified blackness’ image: the lived experience of black Africans from a refugee background in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

This is the first academic study to investigate and compare the lived experience of black Africans who reside in Australia and New Zealand. All twenty research participants in this study settled in Australia and New Zealand via refugee and humanitarian programmes. Research about refugee resettlement in Western countries often uses a resettlement discourse or integration paradigm to frame some of the challenges faced by people from a refugee background. On the grounds that the resettlement discourse and integration paradigms are discursively narrow and therefore, do not adequately account for the lived experience of black Africans, this work deviates from this hegemonic mode of researching and theorising black Africans from a refugee background. Instead, a race analysis, as well as the African diaspora and Africana Studies approach, is utilised to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with black Africans from a refugee background. The aforementioned different perspectives enabled this work to develop its own original theoretical concept – the uncommodified blackness image - with which to interrogate the life struggles of black Africans living in Australia and New Zealand. The findings show that the construction of the image of uncommodified blackness is achieved by deploying identical discursive strategies in both Australia and New Zealand. Through an everyday racism process, which includes institutionalised racism and the utilisation of various racist discourses, the image of uncommodified blackness is developed and constructed. In both Australia and New Zealand, black African refugees are associated with the image of uncommodified blackness - an embodiment of poverty, nescience and philistinism. They are seen as uneducated Others who speak poor English or an accented English, not only non-Western, but essentially ‘un-Western’ Others who threaten the social cohesion of Western countries. The key finding of this research project is that the image of uncommodified blackness shapes the lived experience of participants in both Australia and New Zealand in almost the same way. This contradicts the dominant view that Australia is ‘more racist’ than New Zealand, or the prevailing assumption that New Zealand is more liberal than Australia.