Premium
Re‐imagining the Global Colour Line: The Bolt Case and the Politics of Whiteness
Author(s) -
Jose Jim
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
australian journal of politics and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1467-8497
pISSN - 0004-9522
DOI - 10.1111/ajph.12637
Subject(s) - hegemony , narrative , politics , power (physics) , privilege (computing) , argument (complex analysis) , gender studies , racism , sociology , grammar , white (mutation) , aesthetics , norm (philosophy) , political science , art , literature , law , linguistics , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , physics , quantum mechanics , gene
This paper revisits the controversy generated by a series of publications in 2009 by prominent Australian journalist Andrew Bolt. The overall argument is that the controversy generated by the Bolt case contributed to a reimagining of a twenty‐first century version of the global colour line. Bolt's articles rested on a “racial grammar of whiteness” that enabled him simultaneously to assert and mask the hegemonic naturalness of whiteness. A racial grammar of whiteness mediates what people take to be the norm in representations and writings about the natures, roles and attributes of whites and non‐whites in social situations and the social relations appropriate to them. It enables such views to be presented as just so much common‐sense. Demonstrating this racial grammar at work is important because his articles appeared to echo an earlier era's narratives about race, power and privilege that were themselves informed by the global colour line, and which culminated in the now defunct White Australia Policy. The paper explores how those echoes were given substance within Bolt's articles and the subsequent court case about them, and how this contributed to a reimagining of the global colour line.