ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author talks about the grip whiteness holds in her participants' reflections on multiculturalism, and the racial logics and power relations that underpin their understandings of national identity and belonging in the modern liberal secular state. In unpacking these issues, she enrolls Zygmunt Bauman's theory on strangers, interrogating the discursive mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion deployed by her participants to maintain a strict demarcation between 'in' and 'of' states of belonging among Muslims. Some of the participants the author spoke to unequivocally rejected multiculturalism, expressing nostalgia for the days of the White Australia policy. Those of Australia do the polarizing, adjudicating, dominating and administering of either the phagic or emic strategies. The ungovernable Muslim is therefore perceived as threatening because he or she cannot be dealt with anthropophagically–she refuses assimilation and absorption–nor can she be dealt with anthropoemically–she cannot, as citizen, be expelled or eliminated.
