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Place, Race and Politics presents an integrated analysis of the social and political processes that combined to construct a media-driven ‘crisis’ concerning African youth crime in the city of Melbourne, Australia.
Combining original research and analysis alongside published sources, the authors carefully dissect the anatomy of a racialized and politicized public discourse and delve into the profound impact of this on African-Australian communities in Melbourne. Drawing on political and media analysis and community-based research, the authors investigate how South Sudanese Australians in Melbourne came to be identified, supposedly, as a unique threat to community safety, the role played by the media, state and federal politics, the policing and perceptions of race in this process, and the physical and emotional impacts on affected communities of the law and order crisis concerning ‘African crime’.
While deeply rooted in local conditions, the book resonates with similar examples of the criminalization and othering of racialized communities, the surveillance and exclusion of ‘crimmigrants’, and with popular punitivism and the rise of far-right politics globally in response to deeply felt anxieties about rapid social, economic and cultural change.
How is it that South Sudanese migrants, an overwhelming law-abiding group, have come to be criminalised in Australia? Using the 2016 Moomba ‘riot’, Place, Race and Politics charts the creation of a racialised law and order crisis in Melbourne. This terrific new book provides a detailed analysis of how social and political processes came to associate South Sudanese blackness with violent crime and what the consequences of this criminalisation were on the community. I strongly recommend it.
Leanne Weber is Professor of Criminology at the University of Canberra and a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford University.
Jarrett Blaustein is Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.
Kathryn Benier is Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.
Rebecca Wickes is Professor of Criminology at the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.
Diana Johns is Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Chapter 1. Introduction: The Foundations of a Law and Order Crisis
Chapter 2. From ‘Apex’ to ‘#Africangangs’
Chapter 3. The Racialisation of Crime: ‘African gangs’ and the Media with Chloe Keel, Greg Koumouris and Claire Moran
Chapter 4. ‘No-one Thinks You are Innocent’: Policing the ‘Crimmigrant other’
Chapter 5. Impact on the South Sudanese and Wider Australian Communities
Conclusion: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis