‘Out of place’? An auto-ethnography of refuge and postcolonial exile

The nature of postcolonial exile has changed considerably over the last two or three decades. The demography of migrants has shifted from intellectual dissidents and the participants in brain drain exoduses to all kinds of refugees and asylum seekers. Scholarship on this subject is vast but there is one group that is emerging and scarcely understood – the African-Australians of refugee background. This article seeks to contribute a part of that story using autobiographical or auto-ethnographical insight. My choice of this approach is predicated on the belief that it exploits personal experiences as units within the collective experience of a people. As a refugee from Sudan with some years in Kenya, I have found by experience and in autobiographies of others that blackness trumps African-ness in Diasporic identity constructions in the Western world. This, I argue, masks the ways in which African-Australians are generally understood as reflected in public discourse.