Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World: Refugee Youth and the Pursuit of Identity

Laura Moran’s Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World: Refugee Youth and the Pursuit of Identity introduces the reader to the identity journeys of young refugees from Burma, Sudan, Uganda, and Sierra Leone ¹ living in Brisbane, Australia. Based on data collected in an ethnographic study, Moran develops the theory of dynamic responsiveness to demonstrate that identities are not constructed in a vacuum but in response to social context and national policies such as Australia’s multiculturalism. Subsequently, she concludes that resettled refugee youth (in Australia) have hybridized and essentialized representations of identity. These hybridized and essentialized representations, Moran contends, “reflect the perception and accumulation of a kind of symbolic capital which emerges in dynamic response to certain ideals of multiculturalism” (p. 59). Here she draws on Bourdieu’s conceptions of field, social capital, and habitus. This is the main theoretical contribution of the book.

A strength of the research is the novelty of its focus on refugee youth in Australia. Australia has embraced—at least on paper—a celebration of multiculturalism, but one that “is deeply rooted in whiteness” (p. 27). Moran systematically describes how this multicultural policy is not only understood as “a black or brown issue” (p. 37), meaning that BIPOC are the ones who “do multiculturalism,” but also how it is related to the official decline of the White Australia Policy and the recent increase of global white nationalism and xenophobia.

It is in these diverging discourses and official and social messages around diversity that refugee youth try to make sense of who they are and establish a sense of belonging in a society that has not always been welcoming to non-White immigrants and refugees. For instance, refugee youth have to navigate between messages of tolerance, celebrations of symbolic multiculturalism/ethnicity in schools, and the incessant reminder that being seen as Australian remains reserved for Whites—and perhaps the aboriginal population, but they are not mentioned at all in the book. Thus, it is not surprising that for most refugee youth, in particular Black refugee youth, race is the “central frame of reference” (p. 48).

Here the African refugee youth are also directly responding to what society is telling them: that Africans are most commonly seen as a monolithic group, while their Asian refugee counterparts are not and thus indeed can and do identify with their ethnicity, such as Karen or Burmese. ² Similarly, while Asian and African refugee youth have had to deal with racism, they encounter different forms and intensity of racism. For example, in addition to discrimination at the hands of White Australians, we learn that African refugee youth also have to contend with the racist tropes that some refugee youth from Burma have about Africans: The Burmese youth place themselves on the top of the “refugee hierarchy” by emphasizing that their refugee situations and camps are superior to those that Africans left behind because they are “more poor” and require more help (p. 131). Furthermore, a number of the refugee youth from Burma objectify Black people by describing them as “cool” or praising their dancing skills, which they directly connect to race. In addition, Karen and Burmese youth were vocal about not considering African youth as long-term romantic partners, but rather ones to be dated for a short time to rebel against their own community, in particular their elders and authority figures (e.g., in their church). These examples not only provide further evidence of global anti-Black racism but also illustrate that there is not one refugee experience, but many distinct ones.

Moran then shows another effect of globalization: African refugee youth dealing with racism and searching for ways of belonging turn to role models and aspirations outside Australia. This certainly is related to the lack of a proximal host for African refugees. (I would speculate that perhaps more established Chinese Australian communities fulfill that role for refugees from Burma.) Moran makes an important contribution to the literature about transnational Blackness by documenting how African refugee youth turn to the United States for identity and symbols that include, but are not limited to, former President Obama, hip hop, linguistic expressions, and the American Dream (especially as it relates to material wealth).

What is interesting is that African refugee youth in Australia are able to make these connections to some facets of Black American culture through the impersonal globalization of music, media, and the like but also their personal connections with family members who were resettled in the United States. African refugee youth, in particular the young men in Moran’s study, build on these aspects of this particular Black American culture because they see them not only as ideological and cultural inspiration, but also because they provide a medium for them to deal with their experiences as refugees and their identity journey. ³ In their music, the African refugee youth draw parallels between the “hoods”/”ghettos” ⁴ that some American rappers refer to and their own “hoods” in Africa, seeking to destigmatize their origins and create a new sense of belonging in a globalized world of hip hop and transnational Black culture(s). While African refugee youth embrace some aspects of Black American culture, they do not abandon their African roots; rather the “correct” performance of Africanness remains also important for the youth.

Here, I wish Moran had made some connections to the literature about the global significance of hip hop, especially for children of immigrant youth (e.g., Fernandes [2011] and other research that focuses on the role of hip hop for second-generation immigrants in Germany and France) to show how the Australian case she studied differs or not. Similarly, the book falls a bit into the trap of disciplinary and geographical silos, because readers will observe that Moran rarely makes connections between her findings and theory and research that focus on immigrant and refugee youth in other countries in the global North. I believe these comparisons would have shown how much national contexts—which feature so prominently in the book—matter for identity-making. Two books that could have been useful are Jean Beaman’s (2017 ) Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France and Onoso Imoagene’s (2017) Beyond Expectations: Second-Generation Nigerians in the United States and Britain. Since both of these monographs focus on Black immigrant children, it would have been interesting to see not only how different histories and national immigration policies impact the second-generation Black youth, but also what role their refugeehood plays, since only Moran focuses on forced migrants.

Nevertheless, Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World adds to our understanding of how national contexts shape refugee youths’ identities as they relate to race, ethnicity, and national belonging.