Master narratives as “colonial propaganda” and counternarratives as “refusal”: How African Australians reimagine racial dignity in Australia

This paper utilizes the concept of "colonial master narratives" to examine how racial propaganda is mobilized in the Australian imaginary to "flatten" the stories of Blac/k people and how African Australians deploy counternarratives to reject these racialized projections. Specifically, we examine how master narratives, as a form of colonial propaganda, were challenged and subverted by participants' refusal to be spoken for and about through myths and falsehoods, presented as truisms about who black people are (or are not). In so doing, we analyse how African Australians encounter, negotiate, and actively refuse the colonial 'master' narratives that are institutionalized across Australian politics, policy settings, media representations, and everyday social hierarchies. Forty-two African Australians were recruited across Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, and New South Wales to share their experiences of belonging, Africanness, and racial dignity. The findings demonstrate that, despite ongoing stereotyping, profiling, and racial labelling, African Australians deploy practices of refusal through dignity-affirming counternarratives that actively seek to disrupt deficit-oriented framings of Blackness and Africanness. We argue that such counternarratives are necessary resistances to racial harm and are generative political acts that reimagine life in Australia as something that can be experienced agentically, beyond the racial myths and falsehoods instrumentalized by colonial logics. Counternarratives are, therefore, a way of "refusing indignity" and making space for stories of love, beauty, and joy.