Not Quite White: Lebanese and the White Australia
After receiving Anne Monsour’s book Not Quite White to review, I put it on
my bookshelf at work to read a little further down the track. Taking it home
one day a few weeks later, I discovered I mistakenly had picked up the wrong
book. I also had on the shelf a copy of a book by Matt Wray with the same
main title, but the sub-title “white trash and the boundaries of whiteness.”1
Since I was not going to get to read Monsour’s book that evening, I flicked
through Wray’s monograph instead. Though exploring a different topic – the
emergence of the pejorative term “white trash” to describe a segment of the
American population – there were sections of this book, that I discovered
later, resonated with Monsour’s work. In setting out the theoretical
framework for his argument Wary returns to the eugenics and scientific
material of the late nineteenth century, where the “classifying impulse” was
on show. 2 Included in his book are illustrations of two popular racial
classification schemes of the time. In both of the schema, from the 1895 Funk
and Wagnall Standard Dictionary of the English Language, Syrians appear
classified – both in a table and through images – as “EurAfrican
(Caucasian).” Wray uses these illustrations to establish his argument about
boundaries and notes “[the] unstable and inconstant quality of boundaries
directs our attention to the social interactions among those on either side of
the boundary and to the social interactions across the boundary.”3
Anne Monsour’s book is a detailed study of the shifting and sometime
porous boundary that separated Lebanese Australians from other groups
within the country. M…
Not Quite White: Lebanese and the White Australia
ANNE MONSOUR, Not Quite White: Lebanese and the White Australia
Policy, 1880 to 1947 (Brisbane: Post Pressed, 2010). Pp. 216. $45.65 paper.
REVIEWED BY CATRIONA ELDER, Department of Sociology and Social
Policy, University of Sydney, email: [email protected]