Settler colonialism as miscarriage: Joanne Faulkner, ‘Settler-colonialism’s “miscarriage”‘, Angelaki, 24, 3, 2019, pp. 137-154 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism as miscarriage: Joanne Faulkner, ‘Settler-colonialism’s “miscarriage”‘, Angelaki, 24, 3, 2019, pp. 137-154

24Jun19

Abstract: The relation between Australia’s First Nations peoples and settler-colonial Australians may be characterised as having “miscarried” to the extent that colonial difference is unacknowledged, and Aboriginal peoples are expected to assimilate to white Australian culture. This paper brings Luce Irigaray’s feminist thought into dialogue with Indigenous philosophy and activism to think through this “relation” – or absence of relation. For Irigaray the miscarriage of relationality takes place between women and men when the sexual relation is mischaracterised as procreation, and thus reified as the concrete “child,” rather than conceived as a living, changing “interval” that is shared and maintained by each. Likewise, while coloniser Australians have – via appropriation of Aboriginal children – reduced the relation with Aboriginal peoples to one of absorption or assimilation, First Nations political action offers something akin to Irigaray’s “interval”: a third term co-produced by two different parties […].

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