By focusing on the experience of racism within the Hadchiti community, I show that the problems the Lebanese face in Australia cannot be attributed only to their economic disadvantage, low education and religious difference. My fieldwork was conducted around the time of two pivotal events: the 2005 Cronulla Riots in Sydney and the July 2006 war in Lebanon. The result, among the participants, is a perception of Lebanese Muslim body techniques and modes of using public space as inferior, threatening and out of place.īy drawing on observations gained from ethnographic fieldwork in western Sydney with immigrants who are Maronite Catholics from Hadchit, North Lebanon, I demonstrate the pervasiveness of anti‐Lebanese racism in Australia and the way it cuts across class, gender and religion within the Lebanese community. I enrol Ghassan Hage’s theoretical framework on habitus and the field of Whiteness in multicultural Australia to argue that the fields of gender, class, ethnicity, religion and race – evoked in various settings such as the beach, cafes, parks – ‘fold’ into the field of Whiteness such that Lebanese Muslims are situated in a hierarchy of valuation that privileges the different forms of capital possessed by Bayside residents. Based on in-depth interviews with locals, I show how banal speech acts, interpretations of encounters, corporeal attitudes and practices of exclusion construct the embodied behaviour and haptic space of Lebanese Muslims visitors as threatening and inferior, producing a racialised habitus of Lebanese Muslims. This article focuses on encounters between differently habituated bodies at ‘Bayside’, a popular Anglo-majority Australian coastal town.

Promising Azra by Helen Thurloe