White diasporas: Media representations of september 11 and the unbearable whiteness of being in Australia

While contemporary media studies in Australia has focused on theories of race and representation across different media, research on the intersection of whiteness and media studies is still an emergent field. Theorising whiteness within media studies also requires taking account of the national-local formation of whiteness within Australia. Furthermore, Joseph Pugliese has pointed to the importance of theorising whiteness as an embodied, historical construct that needs to be localised within specific racialised social formations. Consequently, whiteness within the Australian media has to be theorised within the context of "white teleologies" (e.g. assimilative scripts, narratives of the foundational status of the Anglo nation, and the attempted erasure of Indigenous ownership) as well as whiteness as lived realities and visualities. Situating whiteness within these theoretical narrations, this paper will attempt to read productions of whiteness in Australian print media representations of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. How iswhiteness expressed as transnational loyalty? How were the attacks constructed as a threat to whiteness in terms like attacks on "democracy" and "freedom"? These are some of the questions that this paper will attempt to address.