The Locals - Identity, Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond

This book presents the first comprehensive survey of being a local, in particular in Australia. As in much of the colonised, English-speaking world, in Australia the paradox is that the locals are not indigenous peoples but migrants with a specific ethnic heritage who became localised in time to label other migrants as the newcomers and outsiders. Claims of belonging as ‘local' provide a crucial insight into power relations that extend beyond the local level to questions of national identity and the ethics of belonging in a postcolonial, multicultural nation.
How have Anglo-Celtic Australians installed themselves as locals ? Where do Indigenous Australians stand in this local politics of identity ? What are the ethical considerations for how we connect our identities to places while also relating to others in a time of intensifying migration ? This book explores these questions via a multidisciplinary cultural studies approach and a mixed methodology that blends a critical language study of being local with auto-ethnographical accounts by the author, himself a ‘local'.