{"id":56704,"date":"2018-08-04T00:59:52","date_gmt":"2018-08-04T00:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56704"},"modified":"2018-08-04T01:46:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-04T01:46:21","slug":"thinking-relationally-about-race-blackness-and-indigeneity-in-australia-reflecting-upon-acrawsas-symposium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56704","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia: Reflecting upon ACRAWSA\u2019s Symposium"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia: Reflecting upon ACRAWSA\u2019s Symposium<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association<\/a>
\n2018-07-18<\/p>\n

Charlotte Sefton<\/strong>, Ph.D., Arab and Islamic Studies
\nUniversity of Exeter<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the close of her paper, entitled \u2018Navigating Power with Poetry on the Hazardous Drive toward Decolonisation\u2019, Carolyn D\u2019Cruz<\/a> posed the vital question of whether, or not, the work of decolonisation<\/a> can be pursued through engagement with nation-state level Politics. Her question recalled my recent viewing of Angela Davis<\/a> and Gayatri Spivak<\/a> in conversation at the Akademie der K\u00fcnste<\/a> on a panel entitled \u2018Planetary Utopias \u2013 Hope, Desire Imaginaries in a Postcolonial World<\/a>\u2019. Aside from my general sense of wonder at seeing Davis and Spivak in conversation, one particular topic of their discussion had stuck with me; they too had disagreed on the place of the State in the futurity of justice. Whilst Davis had underscored that \u2018the bourgeois nation-state, ensconced as it is in capitalism, would never be able to do the work of ensuring justice\u2019; Spivak, in response, had questioned the real-world utility of refusing to engage it; asserting that our work is, instead, to \u2018insert the subaltern into the circuit of citizenship\u2019, that is into a structure that they could \u2018work within\u2019 as opposed to no structure at all. Whilst Davis conceded that we are tied to engaging the State for now; she maintained that a world free of violence and domination would not be able to retain \u2018any aspect\u2019 of the State as she understood it; Spivak maintained that the State must be seen through a more complexed lens, as both \u2018poison and medicine\u2019. AWCRAWSA\u2019s<\/a> latest symposium, \u2018Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia<\/a>\u2019 provided important interventions to these broader debates in decolonial thought and practice…<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

…Opening the symposium, Irene Watson<\/a> made central to her keynote \u2018Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia\u2019 this linkage between the State and survival. The survival of the Australian State requires that Indigenous people do not survive; thus it has always required<\/em> genocide; it has always demanded the erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies, voices and experiences. The non-survival (the genocide) of Indigenous people is the only way the State survives. As Nikki Moodie<\/a> would later assert in her paper \u2018Decolonizing Race Theory: Place, Survivance & Sovereignity\u2019, echoing Patrick Wolfe, the Settler-Colonial State as such can only function through a logic of elimination<\/a>. The State\u2019s white, colonial-modern and neoliberal logic of capital, property, individualism and ownership cannot make space for Indigenous peoples nor Indigenous ways of being; neither in the sense of relation to land nor of relation to each-other. As Irene Watson reminded us, despite the State\u2019s professions to the contrary, there has been no decolonisation of Australia<\/a>; not least because the \u2018hierarchy of voice\u2019 established by colonialism remains; thus the violent silencing and erasure of Indigenous peoples \u2013 and their calls for self-determination \u2013 also remains. Indeed, both the idea and formation of \u2018the State\u2019 is founded upon the structure of hierarchical leadership and, thus, the principle of the differentiated right to voice. For Angela Davis too (in the aforementioned panel discussion with Gayatri Spivak) the masculinist and individualist nature of leadership as epitomised in the workings of the State is a central obstacle to a politics of collectively, relationality and justice…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opening the symposium, Irene Watson made central to her keynote \u2018Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia\u2019 this linkage between the State and survival. The survival of the Australian State requires that Indigenous people do not survive; thus it has always required genocide; it has always demanded the erasure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bodies, voices and experiences…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,4405,23674],"tags":[9532,986,13952,28870,28872,28869,28871,28873,28874,25600],"class_list":["post-56704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-oceania","category-social-justice","tag-angela-davis","tag-australia","tag-australian-critical-race-and-whiteness-studies-association","tag-awcrawsa","tag-carolyn-dcruz","tag-charlotte-sefton","tag-gayatri-spivak","tag-irene-watson","tag-nikki-moodie","tag-patrick-wolfe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56704"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56705,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56704\/revisions\/56705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}