The work with South Africans in Australia provides some insight into the shared as well as the unique ways in which the ideology of race operates to shape the subjectivities of black people across countries with shared histories of empire and colonialism. Sonn, Ivey, Baker and Meyer (2015) have reported how emigrants from South Africa, a country with a history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, construct racial identities in Australia. Their research focused on people who were racially classified as 'coloured' in South Africa during apartheid, a positioning in a racialized hierarchy that placed white people at the top, black people at the bottom and 'coloured' people between the two. This label and status have been contentious and should be understood in the context of slavery, colonialism and apartheid (Erasmus, 2001; Gqola, 2010). Erasmus (ibid., p. 17) notes that ' $[\ldots]$ coloured identity has never been seen as an identity "in its own right". It has been negatively defined in terms of "lack" or taint, or in terms of "remainder" or excess which does not fit a classificatory scheme'. She argues for a critical engagement with the historical and social conditions within which cultural identities and signifiers were produced, because 'coloured' identities were constructed in the context of dynamics of dominance and subjugation between colonizers and Indigenous African groups. Informed by the writing of Caribbean scholar Edouard Glissant, in particular the notion of creolization, Erasmus (ibid.) essentially calls for a much more sophisticated examination of cultural identities as formed in colonial encounters that have involved cultural dispossession, borrowing and transformation in the post-apartheid context.  
People negotiate racialized identities and afforded meanings from the home country along with the discourses of the new country that interpellate them as black and other based on their perceived skin colour (Sonn, 2006). Participants