Ghassan hage biography
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It is 50 years – two generations – since then Immigration Minister Al Grassby launched the idea of a multicultural Australia at a Melbourne conference in 1973. Ghassan Hage, Professor in Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, and currently visiting scholar at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, has become the most significant intellectual commentator on multicultural Australia of the second of those generations.
The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia – Ghassan Hage (Sweatshop)
The publication of The Racial Politics of Multicultural Australia by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement represents a significant collaboration. Hage is an Australian Arab immigrant, whose forebears came to Australia in the 1930s and settled in Lithgow, where they established a clothing factory. Sweatshop is an urban political project created in western Sydney by a younger generation of Australians from Arab and other immigrant and refugee backgrounds.
The volume contains two of Hage’s early books, White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003), and some later essays exploring the place of racism in the rhetoric and practice of Australian multiculturalism. The foreword has been written by “critically conscio
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Seminar with Professor Ghassan Hage
The patriarchal management of what to keep and what to give of oneself in the making of Lebanon’s diasporic modernity
In this paper I begin by arguing that migration and diasporic culture are not ‘the result’ or ‘an offshoot’ of Lebanon’s capitalist modernity, rather diasporic culture is the culture of Lebanese modernity.
Like all modernities it involves a splitting of the subject between a driven self and a homely self; in the case of diaspora it is a self entangled with the transnational capitalist market and capitalist values and a self yearning for home and to protect what it considers most valuable about itself from this market. This can be a painful split of the self, and in some instances it can be dealt with through a splitting of the married couple rather than a splitting of the self.
In this process it is men who aim to monopolise the possession of what is worthy of being kept and what can be allowed to be given away. The paper examines ethnographically how this logic is integral to the making of diasporic culture.
Short bio
Ghassan Hage is professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held many visiting professorships around the world including at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
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Interview with Ghassan Hage
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