(Mis)Using Histories: Mediterranean Diasporas and the Politics of Belonging

Hello

Thank you for tuning in to the fourth webinar of our 2024 series, Critical Public Conversations: Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining belonging in so-called Australia.

Watch recording here

In this webinar, Daphne Arapakis and Andonis Piperoglou chart the contours of Mediterranean temporal and spatial relationships to colonialism and Indigenous politics by exploring Greek diasporic cultural productions, including graphic murals, engagements with the recent referendum, and narrativisations of migrant struggle and success in the diasporic media landscape.

By examining a mural commemorating the Greek War of Independence alongside another depicting Indigenous and migrant history through a greeting, Andonis Piperoglou interrogates what it might mean for the Greek diaspora to feel not uprooted but perhaps grounded in an inner-city suburb’s public space. Piperoglou points to the potential in migrant communities recognising commonalities with Indigenous people, including shared refusals of a marginalised status. Daphne Arapakis considers how usages of Hellenic antiquity and narratives of migration in various media commentaries in the diasporic Greek press are politically limited when they ignore Indigenous political orders, discount Indigenous sovereignties, and flatten politically significant differences in ways that diminish the magnitude of Indigenous dispossession and the ramifications of ongoing colonialism, including that all non-Indigenous people, despite their different experiences within colonial histories, collectively represent the occupying force in Australia. The points of confluence between Mediterranean migrants and Indigenous shared experience of racialisation are offered as a counterpoint. Through analysing these media examples, Arapakis demonstrates the possibilities for generative reworkings of migrant usages of history, emphasising the invitation to consider alternative historical narratives of Indigenous-migrant relations that can build diasporic solidarities in the present.

As diaspora scholars, Arapakis and Piperoglou offer an understanding of the evolving terrain of Indigenous-diasporic relations. Thinking about how diasporas misuse the past to matter in the present can contribute to a more nuanced framing of settler-colonial culture.

Themes raised in the webinar

Reframing a monolithic transition narrative (from migrant struggle to success and from an assimilationist to a multicultural society) reveals how migrant pasts can work in a generative dialogue with Indigenous sovereignties.
Understanding how situated diasporic expressions are produced, circulated, and reproduced across settler-colonial spaces supports the potential of this relational transformation.

Alternative histories that articulate Indigenous and migrant experiences together may offer a way of rethinking notions of migrant struggle and success that allow the Mediterranean diasporas to be accountable to present Indigenous movements that centre Indigenous sovereignty.

If we acknowledge the importance of history and contra-practices and -institutions that make a difference in how diasporic people understand and act within settler colonial culture, we may figure out alternative ways to turn the past into a usable and uplifting resource in the present.

Questions and comments from the audience

The history of this continent post-invasion is littered with examples of people doing incredible harm to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through their good intentions. But in the case of a diaspora community, what resources are there for that community to know better, to do better? To be supported to think more critically?

How do we find connection without personal shared experiences of racism, for example? Perhaps a large philosophical question of how to encourage real empathy.

Presenters

Dr Andonis Piperoglou is the inaugural Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas at the University of Melbourne. He grew up on Ngunnawal country and has Cypriot and Castellorizian cultural heritage. Andonis has expertise in migration and ethnic history and has published extensively on Greek relations with the transnational politics of whiteness in Australia. He is interested in connections between settler colonialism, race and ethnicity and human movements between the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Recently, his chapter “Settler Migrations” was published in The Cambridge History of Global Migrations, and (with Associate Professor Zora Simic) he co-edited the special issue, “Their Own Perceptions: Non-Anglo Migrants and Aboriginal Australia” for Australian Historical Studies.

Daphne Arapakis is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis, “Diasporic Tensions, Colonial Dimensions: Greeks, Australian Multiculturalism, and Indigenous Sovereignty”, explores the dynamics of Indigenous-ethnic relations in Australia. Daphne is a member of the Greek diaspora and the second generation in her family to be born and raised in the formally industrial migrant suburb of Brunswick on Wurundjeri Country. She recently published an article in the Journal of Intercultural Studies titled “Ethnic Compartmentalisation: Greek Australian (Dis)Associations with White Australia and Indigenous Sovereignty.”

Critical Public Conversations

Sovereignty and Solidarity: Redefining Belonging in So-Called Australia

In 2024, the Australian Centre’s Critical Public Conversations series will explore questions of belonging, borders, and place. We investigate how Australia’s founding as a settler colony constrains capacities to welcome refugees to these shores and highlight moments of transnational solidarity that bypass the settler order. We are guided by theorists, activists, and artists exploring the intersections and incommensurabilities between Indigenous, migrant, and other racialised communities’ politics and lived experiences. This series will go beyond settler binaries, boundaries, and borders, to explore the ways more humane international, domestic, and indeed interpersonal relations are inextricably bound to justice for First Nations.

Later this year

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