An old debate in a new dress (however, if you think about it for a second, a Manichaean rejection of binaries is itself a big fat binary): Scott Burnett, Nettly Ahmed, Tahn-dee Matthews, Junaid Oliephant, Aylwyn Walsh, ‘Indigenous resurgence, collective “reminding”, and insidious binaries: a response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’, Critical Discourse Studies, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

An old debate in a new dress (however, if you think about it for a second, a Manichaean rejection of binaries is itself a big fat binary): Scott Burnett, Nettly Ahmed, Tahn-dee Matthews, Junaid Oliephant, Aylwyn Walsh, ‘Indigenous resurgence, collective “reminding”, and insidious binaries: a response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’, Critical Discourse Studies, 2024

16Jul24

Abstract: This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the powerknowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, we believe it to be a problematic category, especially in Western knowledge production about Indigenous people. Our reasons are that the term conflates the use of history with its recovery, unfairly maligns Indigenous knowledge keepers as self-serving and uninterested in the truth, and introduces an insidious binary which has unwelcome discursive effects, in that longer chains of equivalence ultimately place Indigenous storying and knowledge keeping on the other side of an epistemological divide from “proper” history-writing.

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