Check out the artwork from a new computer game by German software designers Pegasus Spiele.
Of course, “the smartest farmer harvests the biggest potatoes”:
The fresh country air, romantic sunsets, a picnic on a meadow – many people are fascinated by life in the country. A feeling of home is in the air. However, there is more to the life of a farmer than just the genial country life – it also requires many hours of hard work to bring in a rich harvest.
In the 19th century, the USA bought vast tracts of land west of the Mississippi. This farmland with its square and clearly partitioned fields was ideal for the settlers from the east, who soon turned this region into America’s Heartlands.
Players take on the roles of these settlers, developing their lands and building farms. Each cultivated field yields victory points; however, players need to decide round by round whether they actually want to collect these victory points. They might also forego these points and save up for a farm instead, which might yield even more victory points. Bonus tiles offer further options for strategic play.
Games like this have been around almost as long as personal computers have: The Oregon Trail was a classic in the 1970s, which inspired the educational Yukon Trail in 1993; and the more serious The Settlers was developed in 1993, and has been redeveloped right up to 2010 with The Settlers 7: Path to a Kingdom.
In addition to this I have recently been informed of the online virtual world called Second Life, in which players can escape their old life and start afresh in places abounding with new social and economic opportunities; and just like the classic settler fantasia, there are no natives.
Filed under: wacky | Closed
“Natives and the Vanished Dignity”, From New Era, flashed via AllAfricaNews:
For us to achieve the notion of ‘all people are equal’, the colonised must first be deliberately allowed to come at the same socio-economic level as the colonisers and their children, then we can start talking about equality as there can never be equality when a hungry athlete is put at the same line with a satisfied athlete and told to compete at the same time, place and manner.
As this might look as equality to others, it is not to me. The application of equality must be twinned with equity and the principle of fairness. The principle is that yes we must treat equal cases equally but fundamentally, we must deal with unequal cases in proportion to their inequality.
[Frantz] Fanon’s utterances remain relevant in today’s context.
In the words of this magnificent African child, ‘the settler’s town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt; the settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things’.
Far away and in remote areas, is the native place of residence described as ‘ a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire.’
Who doesn’t know that in this country, we still have settlers that use zoological terms in mentioning natives? Just look around and see how the natives are inhumanely treated.
It will not be difficult to stand by the road and see a bakkie packed with more than 20 workers being transported to workplaces, working on a tender worth more than one million Namibian dollars. The natives remain the exploited employees of the settlers and colonisers. We still have segregated schools. Accessibility does not imply a total removal of apartheid remnants and machineries. I visited a school that still has chairs still printed South West Africa while you find a service station with all prices written ‘Rand’ instead of ‘Dollars’.
It is said that settlers have both Namibian and South African citizenship. The settlers are of course ignorant of our revolution. The other day I was at the police station to collect my certificate of conduct, I was in a queue with many people that included the two citizens that I assume to be Afrikaners.
One of them was told by the police officer that a certain document of his that I did not take much note of was missing. In response, this man had the audacity to rudely shout at the police officer, fold his document and throw it to the direction of the ‘constable’ and remarked ‘throw it in your dustbin’.
This event angered me and those patriotic compatriots who were in that same queue. I for one thought that the man will be arrested right away but to my surprise he took off freely – presumably saying ‘the natives cannot do anything to me the son of the settler’.
As a young person, it is very much disturbing seeing this happening in a decolonized motherland and to a state agency to which we have surrendered our natural act of protecting, governing and defending ourselves (our sovereignty). If I am to meet this same man somewhere and he does something to me, should I report him to the police or ‘nandi tulemo ongonyo’ (punch him)?
Having told this story to many citizens from different regions and various places, I soon learned that there are many cases in which the natives are inhumanely treated by the settlers to the point where they are still given to ‘eat with dogs and other pets’.
This appears unreal hearing it from the third party but once you have a conversation with those that have experienced it, you realise that decolonisation has just taken off.
[…]
It seems that Du Bois’s avowal that the problem of the 20th century is that of a colour-line needs to be stretched to the 21st century. What is clear here is that something needs to be done. Natives in the new Namibia must be on top of the food chain.
Needless to say, I end with the submission that if establishing a body to deal with cases pertaining to inhumane treatment of the native is farfetched then the police must do us this little favour of establishing an SMS line where we can tip the police on events of this nature because as I have already indicated, many people especially the unskilled and semi-skilled natives have sold their dignity for survival.
Filed under: Africa, Political developments, postcolonialism | Closed
I recently came across Carolyn Lake’s review of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, and found it interesting. As she writes in her article “Colonial Nation”:
Although Drover is at home on the land, Sarah is not. The character of Neil Fletcher reminds us of this when he remarks on Sarah’s arrival in Darwin: “She won’t last, a delicate English rose withers in the outback.” But Sarah does last, and this can be attributed to her partnership with Drover. It is Drover who literally comes to the rescue to transport Sarah’s cattle to Darwin after she fires Fletcher. It is Drover who gets her served a drink in the front bar, and it is Drover who manages to save the children from Mission Island. Although Sarah does try to recapture Nullah, her passive approach does not compare with Drover’s action- packed search-and-rescue escapade. Drover and Sarah’s relationship ties back again to the land. When the two characters kiss, rain falls on the drought-stricken Darwin. When they consummate their relationship, monsoonal storms appear, the land becomes rejuvenated, birds fly and rivers flow. When Britain is soon to leave Australia defenseless against Japanese attack, it is the very British Sarah, together with the very Australian Drover, who save the land.
This relationship between myth and land has deeper consequences, creating a settler discourse around land that displaces any notion of dispossession from Indigenous peoples. Early in Australia, Nullah tells Sarah that she is like the Rainbow Serpent, that she will heal the land. But Sarah will do more than heal the land; she will own it. Do Sarah’s healing powers justify her ownership? Sarah’s mythic propensity to cultivate the land is curiously similar to the settler’s ability to develop agriculture. The broad meaning of Terra Nullius is land belonging to no one, land over which no one has sovereignty. This includes but is not limited to an expression of sovereignty through the development of agriculture. Sarah’s adoption of the title of Rainbow Serpent, the title that seems to distance her from the status of colonizer, invader or dispossessor, comes eerily close to the doctrine of Terra Nullius, the doctrine that “justified” European colonization of Australia. Rather than attempting to circumvent Indigeneity, by naming Sarah the Rainbow Serpent, Indigenous discourses are appropriated by European ones, constructing these alternative meanings and histories.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
K. N. Gulson and R. J. Parkes, “From the barrel of the gun: policy incursions, land, and Aboriginal peoples in Australia” Environment and Planning 42(2), 2010, 300 – 313.
Abstract:
This paper focuses on the enduring traces of colonialism within the Australian nation-state and the ongoing challenges to Aboriginal peoples’ rights, especially land rights. We try to make sense of contemporary federal government and New South Wales state, or provincial, government policy changes which connect land use, access and ownership to social welfare, and which target Aboriginal peoples in remote, or outback, areas and the inner city. We connect these two policy initiatives by pointing to the tension between social and planning policies, conceptions of landownership, and the notion of Aboriginal self-determination. We try to understand the rationale and enactment of these policies through the idea of policy incursions. We argue that policy incursions represent a constellation of settler nationalism, the enactment of a white national imaginary, and the exploitation of crisis that reinscribe Aboriginal people in 21st-century Australia as objects of state policy, while marginalising them as subjects of the state.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Here are some snippets from an essay by James Hughes (LSE), published recently in the Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, and subsequently available online as an e-print:
A persuasive case has been made for the colonial “land grabbing” origins of the modern conception of genocide. A pattern of genocide has emerged historically in places where land greed has become infused with religious bigotry, and where the racist and religious ideologies of coercive colonial conquest combine with settler colonialism (Kiernan, 2007). European philosophers have debated since the Sixteenth century on the morality of colonial occupation and barbarism, including the physical and “cultural” genocides of indigenous societies versus their rights – all conducted under the rubric of the mission civilisatrice (Fitzmaurice, 2008). Historically, settler colonists and the settler colonial mentality of forced acquisition, have been the driving forces for the dehumanization and displacement of peoples, the logical conclusion of which is genocide. The interaction of religion and the interests of settler colonialists is most illuminating when the core elements of both are the basis for an overriding state ideology as in the US ideology of “Providence” and later “Manifest destiny”, and the Zionist Biblically-rooted claims to Palestine. In these and other cases genocidal massacres were employed as a terrorizing land clearing device. While state leaderships have often attempted to disguise the motivations of racism and religious bigotry within the more legitimate ideological wrappings of security or national interests, it is generally only the exceptionally fanatical leader who openly expresses clarity of genocidal intent. Cromwell saw his massacres of the Irish as a “judgement of God” on “Papists”, and the Cromwellian attributed slogan “to Hell or Connaught” captures the logic of his policy. Hitler’s demand for “living space” for Germany in the East was also intended to secure an ideological result – to obliterate “Jewish Bolshevization”. Yet, even great democrats can articulate deeply genocidal instincts. How different the Jefferson Memorial would look if it inscribed his damnation of the native Americans: “to pursue them to extermination”. To be fair to Jefferson, this and a few comments of similar ilk were reluctantly made in the aftermath of massacres of settlers by native Americans, and unlike many of his contemporaries, Jefferson recognized that genocide was part of the “Anglo” culture of colonial occupation, from Ireland to Asia. For some scholars, ethnic competition for land was a factor in the Rwanda genocide, as it is in Darfur. A sole focus on threat perception and security dilemmas, however, distracts us from the role of state ambitions and material interests. Elites may exaggerate a threat and thereby provide a discourse to legitimize acts which may, in fact, have an ulterior motive, whether it is the pursuit of material interests – seizing and colonizing lands from another group; or imposing ideological hegemony – as in racial purity, or counter communism.
[…]
So the question remains what makes some societies genocidal and others not? Much of the scholarship on genocide, generated from the US and informed by liberal norms, is overly focused on the relationship between genocide and twentieth century totalitarian and authoritarian states. As Kuper, Mann and others have argued, genocide affects all historical periods and regimes, including democracies. If we further take into account the role of state strategic ambitions, ideological and material interests, racism, imperialism and settler colonialism, and forms of inequality and group competition we come closer to explaining why state/societal resentments against specific groups can turn genocidal. Ideologies of racial superiority, in particular, however explicit or implicit, are likely to be an important part of the justification for genocide.
Filed under: Genocide, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Richard Broome, author of the survey history Aboriginal Australians, has recently released a new and updated version for Allen and Unwin Press, featuring coverage right up to the Intervention, and engagement with more recent scholars.
In the creation of any new society, there are winners and losers. So it was with Australia as it grew from a colonial outpost to an affluent society.
Richard Broome tells the history of Australia from the standpoint of the original Australians: those who lost most in the early colonial struggle for power. Surveying two centuries of Aboriginal-European encounters, he shows how white settlers steadily supplanted the original inhabitants, from the shining coasts to inland deserts, by sheer force of numbers, disease, technology and violence. He also tells the story of Aboriginal survival through resistance and accommodation, and traces the continuing Aboriginal struggle to move from the margins of a settler society to a more central place in modern [Australia].
Find out more info here.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights | Closed
In a recent editorial for Vanguard (which also flashed up on AllAfrica News), Nigeria is called “A country of settlers”:
The arguments are not about who settlers are and who are the indigenes, they are about the fact that Nigerians are now grappling with issues of citizenship. It is an issue that deserves handling with uttermost sensibility and sensitivity.
How are citizens of a 50-year-old country unable to identify themselves? Why are we not able to learn from other countries?
Each time there is a conflagration in any part of the country, most of those who claim they are seeking solutions to the crisis are behind it. How can we peg all crises on tribe and religion? The issues are deeper and we have to confront them with sincerity instead of exploring poverty, unemployment, and religion to create troubles throughout the country.
[…]
We have to look beyond legislation to free ourselves from the shackles of being settlers in our own country. The time is now.
Nigeria finds itself in a postcolonial predicament – embattled with ‘settler’ and ‘native’ as constitutive ideas – and processes there seem to reflect some of the state-building dilemmas identified by Mahmood Mamdani a decade ago in Citizen and Subject and other works. (See also this post from last week.)
Filed under: Africa, Political developments | Closed
Penny Edmonds has recently published Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities with UBC Press. From their website comes the following details:
Colonial frontiers were not confined to the bush, backwoods, or borderlands. Early towns and cities in the far reaches of empire were crucial to the settler colonial project. The lives of Indigenous peoples in these urbanizing frontiers have been overshadowed by triumphant narratives of European progress.
Urbanizing Frontiers explores the lives of Indigenous peoples and newcomers in two Pacific Rim cities — Victoria, British Columbia, and Melbourne, Australia. Built on Indigenous lands and overtaken by gold rushes, these cities emerged between 1835 and 1871 in significantly different locations, yet both became cross-cultural and ultimately segregated sites of empire. Victoria’s population came to include large numbers of Indigenous peoples, a legacy of the fur trade, whereas Melbourne’s Indigenous population was far smaller. An explanation lies in the structural features of the fur trade versus pastoralism, and the ensuing politics of race that played out at the spatial, imaginative, social, and legal levels, where bodies and spaces were rapidly transformed, sometimes in violent ways.
This innovative, interdisciplinary study reconceptualizes the frontier as urbanizing space by charting the development of the settler-colonial city and exploring the lives of the newcomers, Indigenous peoples, and mixed-race peoples who, in turn, shaped its development. It will be of interest to students and scholars of colonialism, urbanism, Indigenous studies, transnational history, cultural geography, and Pacific Rim studies.
Congratulations to Penny Edmonds for focusing on the municipal tier of settler regimes. Far away from dusty frontiers, settler cities were nevertheless sites of confrontation and domination, and Edmonds fills a void in the scholarship with this comparative history. I look forward to getting my hands on a copy.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Scholarship and insights | Closed
tiki midnight
Brad Parker, “Tiki Midnight” (200?), print on wood block. Find his stuff here. Thanks Rob A. for pointing this one out.
Filed under: art, Hawaii | Closed
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.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights, Seminar | Closed
