Securing the borders of English and Whiteness

Title
Securing the borders of English and Whiteness
Publication Date
2023
Author(s)
Piller, Ingrid
Torsh, Hanna
Smith-Khan, Laura
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3551-221X
Email: lsmithkh@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:lsmithkh
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
Sage Publications Ltd
Place of publication
United Kingdom
DOI
10.1177/14687968211052610
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/61054
Abstract

This article examines how racial and linguistic identities are constructed on the Australian reality TV show Border Security. Based on an analysis of 108 episodes of the show involving 253 border force officers and 128 passengers, we explore how the hegemonic Australian identity of the White native speaker of English is constructed on the show. Officers are represented as a relatively uniform group of heroes devoted to protecting Australia’s national security. Simultaneously, most of them look white and sound like native speakers of Australian English. In contrast to the officers, passengers, as their antagonists, do not have a predominant racial or linguistic profile. They are represented as highly diverse. What unites them is not any racial or linguistic profile but that they represent a security risk. Threat thus comes to be mapped onto diversity. The show’s schema of heroes and antagonists invites the audience to identify with the heroes. By identifying with the White-English heroes, the audience also comes to take on their power of judgment over its diverse linguistic and racial Others. The analysis shows how the White-English identity bundle is constructed as the authoritative and legitimate position of the judging knower. The article’s main contribution is to show how the raciolinguistic construct of the White-English complex is made hegemonic in a diverse society officially committed to multiculturalism.

Link
Citation
Ethnicities, 23(5), p. 706-725
ISSN
1741-2706
1468-7968
Start page
706
End page
725
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

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