Ruby Hamad

After more than a decade away from publishing, Claire Thomas’s much anticipated second novel The Performance puts her squarely back in the limelight.

“There are no accidents in the rhetoric of protection: it intends to seal off white Western society from the remainder of the world’s population both biologically and geographically. The white female body was, and often still is, regarded as in need …”

“Perhaps they are afraid that one day it will finally dawn on us that to be “white” does not denote an inherited ethnicity but an acquired power. That if we were to untangle being white from being English or Australian or Canadian or European, then …”

“There is no separating racism from the rest of Australian society. Exasperated as white people may be to hear about race, again, your frustration pales next to those forced to live it and fight it. As Labor MP Anne Aly tearfully admitted this week, we …”

“Faith is immaterial to Islamophobia. Blanket suspicion of Islam is not really about what Muslims do and do not believe. It is a means of asserting “Western” values above Islamic ones, based on the predication that the two are inherently incompatible.”