Racism and Resistance Among the Filipino Diaspora ─ Everyday Anti-racism in Australia

Filipinos are among the country’s largest migrant groups in Australia.

This book offers a close examination of Filipino migration and settlement to Australia. It explores the notion of everyday anti-racism – the manner in which individuals manage racism in their day to day lives. Through case studies based on extensive fieldwork the author shares ethnographic observation and interview material that demonstrate the ways in which Filipinos are racially constituted in Australian society and are subject to everyday racisms that criss-cross different modes of power and domination. Drawing on theoretical approaches in critical race scholarship and the sociology of everyday life, this book illuminates the operation of racism in a multicultural society that persists insidiously in everyday exchanges across a range of public and private spaces. More importantly, it explores the quotidian ways in which ‘victims’ of racism cope with routine racialised domination, an area underdeveloped in anti-racism research that has tended to focus on institutional anti-racism politics.

Shedding light on a neglected corner of the global Filipino diaspora and highlighting the complexity of lived experiences in translocal and transnational social fields, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of diaspora and migration studies, the study of race and racism and ethnic minorities, with particular reference to the Asian diaspora.

Kristine Aquino is an Associate Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests include constructions of race and ethnicity in everyday life, multiculturalism, transnationalism, whiteness, and anti-racism.