Decolonising the Past: African Popular Music and Diasporic Heritage in Australia

This paper investigates notions of diasporic heritage and identity through the lens of contemporary African Australian popular music. People of African descent have been in Australia since 1788, but they continue to experience exclusion and high levels of racial discrimination. Representations of Africans in contemporary Australian politics and media tend to emphasise stereotypical and essentialist descriptions that do not adequately reflect the diversity and complexity of people of African descent and their experiences in Australia. While research has drawn attention to the problem of negative representations of Africans in Australian society (Nolan et al. 2011), the strategies that African Australian communities use to challenge these representations have not been adequately explored. This paper examines popular music as a powerful site for negotiating multi-layered identities and plural histories, challenging onedimensional representations of African Australian people. Drawing on ethnographic research with African Australian communities in Sydney and Melbourne, I argue that in the context of migration and diaspora, music becomes heritage. That is, through their music, African Australian performers negotiate and communicate notions of history in order to articulate a sense of place and belonging. By focusing on popular music, this research seeks to draw attention to “hidden histories” (Hall 1990) of African Australian communities, as well as cultural strategies for maintaining a sense of coherence in the face of displacement and disjuncture.