Some more details about the round table on settler colonialism at the University of Technology, Sydney  (3 May 2010) have come to hand. Have a read through the abstracts:

Dr. Lorenzo Veracini

Queen Elizabeth II Fellow

Institute for Social Research

Swinburne University of Technology

Decolonising Settler Colonialism

This paper contributes to interdisciplinary reflection on decolonisation by focusing on the settler polities of the British Empire. These polities achieved independent status in the context of metropole-assisted processes that envisaged ultimate substantive devolution as an enhancement of political ties rather than their discontinuation. These drawn-out processes have been the subject of extensive comparative scrutiny; however, the isopolitical nature of the imagination that underpinned these shifts has remained relatively unexplored (an isopolity can be described as a single political community joining separate jurisdictions). The independence of the “other Englands” (as J. A. Froude described them in Oceana [1886]) was to constitute (as Charles Wentworth Dilke put in Greater Britain [1890]) a British Empire of “racial identity”: an empire imagined as a dialectical counterpoint to the ongoing political subordination of the colonial world. Appraising isopolitical relationships can contribute to an understanding of independence and decolonisation that goes beyond familiar narratives emphasizing anti-colonial militancy, metropolitan concessions, and nationalist takeovers in the context of a nonsovereign to sovereign/colony to independent polity paradigm. The first section of this paper focuses on isopolitical relations as an alternative possibility besides sustained colonial domination on the one hand, and internationally recognized independence within an international system of formally independent polities on the other.

Crucially, these polities’ independence was premised on an assumption of ultimate responsibility regarding the management of the indigenous peoples contained within the area they exclusively claimed.

Paradoxically, as it removed the possibility of appealing to the metropolitan sovereign against settler abuse, this decolonisation was thus premised on the enhanced colonisation of indigenous others. The second section of this paper outlines what is here defined as deep colonisation: a circumstance in which the very institutions that should operate towards the supersession of colonial forms actually entrench colonialism’s operative registers (that is, settler independence constitutes an acceleration, not a discontinuation, of colonialpractices). The notion of deep colonisation also upsets traditional amelioristic narratives emphasising progressive processes leading to the achievement (or granting) of social and political rights for colonized and formerly colonised peoples. A focus on decolonisation processes in settler colonial settings indicates the need to think about independence and decolonisation as (at times) antithetical dynamics.

dr. Maria Giannacopoulos

Casual Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory

Department of Media Music and Cultural Studies

Macquarie University

Xenos, Nomos, Bia

Following on from Wolfe’s assertion that settler colonialism is a structure and not a single event as well as Razack who reminds us that white settler society continues to be structured on racial hierarchy where white settlers “become” the original inhabitants, I want to argue that specific attention must be focussed on particular structures, in this case on the colonial structuring dimensions of Australian law that generate the enabling conditions for ‘Australia’. For this paper I make this argument by placing some of the work whiteness studies scholar Ghassan Hage under a critical gaze in order to begin to articulate what is at stake when critics of race ignore the structural components of ongoing legally colonial relations by effectively producing nomophilic theories which are embedded with confidence and faith about law, taking for granted that law can produced the equality and fairness it promises. This nomophilia in effect, disallows a complete critique of colonial relations since it skims over the structural colonial dimensions of white law. Hage is not the only critic of race relations in Australia who has reproduced Anglocentric logic via a critique of colonialism in Australia. I choose to focus on Hage here precisely because his work has been taken up so enthusiastically especially in critical race and whiteness studies as a potent critique of whiteness in Australia. Whilst Hage’s work conveys the sense of an anti-colonial position, I argue that his arguments are ultimately tokenistic, reductive and disembodied since their overall effect is of an anglocentricism which does not effectively challenge the legitimacy of white institutions of power. To make these arguments, I focus on Hage’s pathologisation of the state, his comments about Indigenous Australians and his comments on the Tampa events of 2001.

dr. Gaia Giuliani

Dept. Politica Istituzioni Storia
University of Bologna, Italy
Associate Visiting Scholar (2008-2011)
Endeavour Research Fellow (2009-2010)
Transforming Cultures Research Centre

University of Technology, Sydney (NSW)
Matching-colours: settler colonialism and colour line

If, since the very beginning of settler colonialism in Western modern history, prior-ness, inside-ness and outside-ness are formulated, and visualised, in terms of phenotypical difference, are these formulations casual or, rather, very accurate in associating a precise colour to its excluded and differently included outsiders (indigenes and migrants)? As we assume that there is no casual connection between colour taxonomies and their political function, the following question is: is in settler colonialism a peculiar economy of colours, a particular, situated reappraisal of the politics of colours imagined, formulated and applied in Europe and its transnational/colonial space that is meant to underpin, after the so called “crisis of humanism” (Anderson 2007), both the separation of the new (settler) Nation from what is before and inside (indigenes), and a precise visual boundary that distinguishes and keep separated the new geo-political entity from what comes from the surrounding lands and seas (migrants)?

This paper will try to grasp the connection between precise raciologies in settler colonial context – a particular practical and theoretical articulation of whiteness and blackness – and the need to claim, on one hand, the absolute uniqueness and legitimacy of the settler State in itself, and, in the other, its separateness and intimate difference from the surrounding barbarity. Firstly, it will investigate the very specific articulation of the black paradigm in the process of settlers’ self-racialisation (Guillaumin 1972; Taguieff 1987); it will investigate, in particular, its connection to the need of founding the absolute uniqueness and legitimacy of the conquest and the creation of a new political entity on an exclusive idea of humanness. Secondly, it will investigate the very peculiar articulation of the white paradigm in the process of hetero-racialisation; it will investigate its connection to the process of extracting “the pure white” from a racially undetermined chaos and keep the new political space white.

In that sense my paper will correspond to a “colours-matching” invesigation aiming to identify, without separate them from the whole system they are both part of, the two different racist logics operating in settler colonialism – the “logic of elimination” and the “logic of exploitation” (Guillaumin 1972; Wolfe 1999). In fact, if these logics have emanated from the same common racial thinking, and converge into the same “racism of State” and “popular racism” (Wieviorka 1991), their inherent taxonomies are functional to two absolutely different type of racist violence. Those taxonomies make blackness (in Australia and in South Africa, and redness in the Americas) symbolize the unspoken, or unspeakable, foundational violence against prior inhabitants; and whiteness correspond to the “colonial violence” that identifies “citizenship” as a sort of will-be status for a series of brown, yellow, non-white subjects (Pearson 2001; Pugliese 2002).

dr. Kiran Grewal

Lecturer, Socio-legal Studies and Human Rights
School of Social and Political Sciences

University of Sydney

The Native versus the Alien’: Discourses of ‘belonging’ & the Reinforcement of White Australian Hegemony

In this paper I seek to analyse the discourses of ‘belonging’ deployed by both mainstream political parties and migrant/ ethnic minority and indigenous activist groups in the Australian public space. My argument is that much can be understood regarding how colonial settler identity is legitimated, normalised and reinforced as the ‘primary’ identity through looking at the ways ethnic minorities and indigenous Australians are ‘accepted’ by dominant political discourses and in fact situate their own claims to belonging in Australian society.

Frequently indigenous claims to rights in Australia have centred around their authentic belonging to the territory of Australia: even the use of the language of ‘traditional owners’ both establishes their geographical authenticity and separates their claims to ownership from the notion of standard property rights asserted by white settlers.

Meanwhile, migrant and ethnic-minority communities are often ‘welcomed’ by political leaders on the basis of the ‘contribution’ they make to Australian society. This discourse of ‘positive contribution’ – frequently associated with labour and economic contribution (the very basis of the original multiculturalism policy documents) – is also one many of the communities themselves seek to emphasise in their calls for recognition as part of Australia.

My argument is that these two discourses of ‘belonging’ frequently emerge as in conflict with each other. Members of ethnic minority communities often espouse horrendous racist views of indigenous peoples on the basis that ‘we have struggled against racism and have made good, why can’t they?’.

Meanwhile, indigenous assertions of authenticity and connections with land as the basis for their rights claims presents a problematic parallel to the anti-asylum seeker discourse which focuses on the rights of territorial sovereignty as a basis for exclusion.

Clearly the framing of discourses of belonging in these ways operates to preclude possibilities for solidarity between different marginalised groups. This may or may not be viewed as problematic, depending on one’s perspective: some argue that there can be no solidarity when the experiences of marginalisation and oppression are so different. However, what I consider to be more troubling about this dichotomisation of struggles is the lack of problematisation of white settler identity. By situating the ‘native’ as inherently connected with the land (in a spiritual way) and the migrant as not ‘belonging’ except through their contribution to building the nation, the position of the white settler remains unquestioned. As many of the policy documents on multiculturalism evidence – the white settler identity emerges as the core identity around which that of the indigenous Australian and the migrant (non-white settler) are built. Moreover, this is reinforced by the lack of dialogue between these two groups that have been rendered ‘peripheral’. On the one hand, the denial of common experience presents us with an ironic situation that we are only able to speak to each other through the white mediator. On the other, each group risks framing its discourse of belonging in a way that allows it to be co-opted and used against the other. This separation and placing in opposition of the two groups reflects an important feature of Australian national identity construction that must be understood if we are to truly move from a colonial to a postcolonial nation.

dr. Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel

Lecturer, Sociology
School of Arts & Sciences
The University of Notre Dame Australia

Sydney Campus

The Right to Discriminate: Settler Colonialism, Solidarity and Sovereignty*

In March 2009 two national peak non government organisations, the National Ethnic Disability Alliance and the Aboriginal Disability Network, lodged a joint letter to the National Human Rights Consultation, noting concern that that “there is little recognition in existing legislation that the experience of discrimination can be complex, and not simply reducible to disability or race discrimination, but must be treated as a combination of both” and calling on the Australian Government to “examine intersecting forms of discrimination as part of the development and enhancement of Australia’s human rights protections”.

The joint letter represents an attempt to find points of announced solidarity in relation to race and disability in order to strategically navigate towards a shared social policy outcome. However this solidarity claim elides the tensions inherent between recent migrants with disability and indigenous people with disability in a shared perspective on discrimination, particularly in light of a history of settler colonialism, where, for example, migrants might be both agents and victims of discrmination.

This paper explores the way in which discrimination claims are shaped by uneasy solidarities, which rest upon unacknowledged conflicts. Drawing on both Michel Foucault and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, I argue that because racialised positions are based upon intense, albeit often veiled, forms of conflict, hierarchisation and violence, the possibility of solidarity, even for strategic advantage, is precarious and risks reproducing existing forms of conflict. This paper concludes with a reflection on Jacques Derrida’s recently published /The Beast and the Sovereign/ seminars, arguing that sovereignty might be understood as a right to discriminate – a right to ‘stupidity’ – which must be a factor in considerations of the impact of settler colonialism as a formation.