Exploring New Possibilities for Decolonial Praxis in “Multicultural” Australia from “Latinx”

Abstract

This thesis explores the transnational circulation and recontextualisation of “Latinx” as a contested political and epistemological signifier within the Australian settler-colonial and multicultural context. Originating in the United States as a gender-inclusive and decolonial linguistic intervention, Latinx has sparked extensive debates around language, identity, power, and representation. While its U.S.-centric genealogy has been widely theorised, its translocation beyond the U.S.—particularly into Australia—remains critically underexplored.

Situated at the intersection of decolonial theory, settler-colonial studies, and intersectionality, the thesis conceptualises Latinx not as a stable identity category but as a mobile, contested signifier whose meanings are produced and negotiated through public discourse. Methodologically, it adopts a non-extractive, text-based approach aligned with critical discourse analysis and reflexive research praxis, analysing a curated corpus of public texts from digital platforms, cultural organisations, and policy discourse.

Findings demonstrate that Latinx occupies a marginal yet symbolically charged position in Australia, circulating primarily within arts-based, academic, and LGBTQ+ spaces while remaining largely unintelligible within state multicultural discourse structured by the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) framework. The analysis reveals how Latinx debates expose the depoliticising limits of Australian multiculturalism and illuminate deeper tensions around race, gender, migrant settler complicity, and Indigenous sovereignty.

The thesis contributes theoretically to debates on the transnational travel of identity politics, empirically to Latin American diaspora studies in Australia, and methodologically to decolonial, reflexive, and text-based research practices, framing Latinx as a diagnostic lens to examine the contradictions and possibilities of decolonial praxis in a settler-colonial multicultural state.