نبذة مختصرة : My thoughts on this paper were partly prompted by the Christchurch massacre, but it is not what this paper will be about. I am interested in exploring the short and long term rise of what I will provisionally call “whiteness extremism” in Australia. I want to discuss it in terms of its “Australianness”, and as part of a wider phenomenon in the club of nations to which Australia belongs as a white and as a settler colonial society. I am particularly interested in how articulations of whiteness in its extreme forms are related to “softer” more broadly embraced – and endorsed – versions of whiteness, and how oscillations of extreme and soft whiteness enable whiteness to (as I will argue) persist across time, as a component of, rather than an aberrant form of, modernity. Since this is an EASA conference, I will pay some limited attention to the relationship between Australian whiteness and similar discourses in Europe. Finally, I will discuss how the usage of terms such as “white”, “whiteness”, “right wing extremism”, “terrorist attacks” channels the phenomena they represent into already accepted discourses that also contain them precisely in terms of alienating extremeness that allows for softer more “benign” forms of “concerned citizens”.
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