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Parallel futures? Indigenous resurgence and the haunting of the settler
Abstract
Two kinds of futures have emerged in the shadow of colonialism: the haunted futures of a white settler society that suppresses or denies knowledge of the ‘founding wound’ of colonial invasion; and Indigenous futures constituted by a refusal of defeat and a ‘radical resurgence.’ While they appear as parallel and irreconcilable trajectories, we suggest, after Ahlqvist and Rhisiart (2015, 'Emerging pathways for critical futures research: Changing contexts and impacts of social theory', Futures, vol. 71, pp. 91-104), that a haunting continues to link them; projects of Indigenous refusal and resurgence continue to alert non-Indigenous settler societies to a past not done with, and a futures trajectory based on denial and deception that must be unlearned. We describe one such project of Indigenous resurgence in South West Queensland, Australia, and suggest that it is an example of a local resurgence that performs, through its truth-telling, a ‘generative haunting’ of white settler society. In doing so, it forges a link between Indigenous and non-Indigenous futures, disturbing, and making more contingent, white settler imaginaries of the past and the future.
... Using the logic of whiteness, Palmer, Walsh, and Batorowicz (2022) show how colonialism casts shadows that continue to deny or suppress knowing the "founding wound" of the colonial invasion for Indigenous peoples. In this way, economic projects of consumption continue as the coloniser intended, resulting in policies that exclude Indigenous participation and the living Land. ...
Imagine being in a university that functions in a place-based culturally regenerative way. In this concept paper, the authors bring together theory, practice, and experience, in the service of transforming universities towards place-based cultural regeneration. At present, Australian universities operate using an economic philosophy of neoliberal corporatism characterised by hierarchical management strategies, competitive tendencies, patriarchal values, and discourse characterised by bifurcation or binary thinking. These features illustrate a worldview that is entangled with the meta crises of our times such as climate change, species loss, hatred/intolerance, and unfathomable violence. The authors consider ways of moving towards a place-based, Indigenous-informed, practical, relational way of learning, being and knowing differently. The paper tentatively assembles a local, place-based culturally regenerative worldview based on living, vibrant, responsive places that embrace people who collaborate with Country – in the Indigenous sense of deep relationality. Within this worldview, the authors propose collaborative ways of governing, teaching, learning, and leading that is necessary for place-based cultural regeneration. In conclusion, the authors outline a pathway towards universities as places of regenerative cultures, which prioritise the nurturing of learning to live and work beyond the current societal paralysis on the road to collapse.
... In the following sections, we draw together threads of theory from aesthetics (the perennial "art versus craft" debate) and from writings on hauntology, to show how the processes of fabrication and encounter in textile art make it peculiarly suited to carrying a difficult and silenced past through artist and artwork to the viewer. The artworks of one of the authors, Batorowicz, serve as a touchstone for the reflections of both Batorowicz and Palmer, an oral historian and ethnographer specialising in trauma narrative (see Palmer, Walsh, and Batorowicz 2022, for our discussion of oral histories, hauntings and truth-telling). ...
Autobiographical trauma art is a way to connect its viewers with the artist and her experience , and with the history in which this experience occurred. We argue that when autobiographical trauma art involves craft practices, such as working with textiles, the relationships between history, the artist, the artwork, and the viewer become particularly strong. The interplay between the present and past, viewer and artist, through fabrication and encounter constitute, we suggest, a series of hauntings that draw attention to something broader-structural violence, selective forgetting, or wilful ignorance-in which trauma was, and remains, situated. We use examples of textile artwork by Beata Batorowicz to explore autobiographical trauma art as a tactile, embodied response to the intergenerational trauma arising from her family's experiences in Poland during World War II. A line of hauntings, traceable from the artist via the artwork to the viewer, parallels the flowing effects of intergenerational trauma, but the intervention of the artist, in creatively addressing her own ghosts, offers the viewer and a wider public the opportunity to experience her truth-telling in the form of "empathic unsettlement" (LaCapra 2014 (2001), 41) and a new comprehension of a past that has fallen by the wayside of history. ARTICLE HISTORY
... We offer a brief overview of how reparation and reparative endeavours are activated in different politically-engaged scholarly domains, namely in relation to: racial justice, transitional justice, socio-ecological justice and psychic justice. Our aim here is to map, albeit partially, a set of ideas that can be potentially generative, enriching the growing work within futures-thinking that seeks to address head-on questions of ethics and transformation in the face of complex historical and contemporary injustices (see for example : Abazeri, 2022;Nikolakis, 2020;Palmer et al. 2022;Ranjan, 2023). This is neither an abstract nor a purely theoretical endeavour. ...
The tropics have been first to suffer from the effects of unsustainable practices on land and sea. The Carbon_Dating project (2019 to 2025)—an artwork and cultural campaign designed to provoke a re-imagining of human-grass futures that builds relationships with native grasses—has worked in Far North Queensland, Australia, with two First Nations participants: Mbabaram Elder, knowledge-holder, and ethnobotanist Gerry Turpin, and Kuku Yalanji Master Weaver and artist Delissa Walker Ngadijina. Using traditional knowledge and creative works to forge new imaginaries that selectively choose or refuse those of the coloniser, the contributions of these two participants are an assertion of Indigenous relationalities in the tropics, and offer others a way of re-imagining plant-human futures in the wider world.
El articulo presenta una revisión, reflexión y replanteamiento de los estudios de futuro(s) en el contexto de un terracidio motivado principalmente por el capitaloceno. Lo anterior, a partir de una limitada concepción de los imaginarios de futuros presentes en nuestra(s) sociedad(es), caracterizados por una tendencia tecno-determinista, poniendo en cuestión el monofuturismo. Por tanto, se manifiesta el rol de la especulación, la imaginación, y los diseños críticos como marco referencial para reclamar de nuevo nuestro(s) futuro(s). En este camino, se describen seis ramificaciones de los etnofuturismos como una espacio cultural, comparado y contextual desde los movimientos culturales y artísticos. Abriendo la discusión ampliamente para considerar el diseño especulativo, la ficción científica y la ficcionalización de los sistemas de conocimiento alternos como espacio fértil para futuros pluriversales mucho más que humanos.
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna’s 2018 collaborative video poem *Rise* is a trans-Indigenous call to action. Set along the watery edges of the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the stark ice sheets of Greenland, the images that accompany their words train our eyes on water: a common, critical element of life as it shape-shifts across the globe. As climate change threatens the homeland of each poet through rapidly increasing glacial melt, the poem articulates how the Western world’s willful denial of irreversible damage performs a colonial violence with deep roots. This article contextualizes *Rise* by exploring nuclear histories of dispossession used to make way for the extension of normative American domestic life onto and into Indigenous territories cleared for Cold War projects. In doing so, I consider how Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna offer a particularly salient response to the militarized infrastructures so violently imposed upon their territories in order to trouble the spatial and conceptual cleaving of anthropogenic precarity between “remote” places and a culpable Western world.
Community-engaged research takes place at a complex social site that has both a history and a future as well as encompassing the project activities of the researchers and community members. We argue that a crucial methodological aspect of undertaking such research is the development of trust relationships between researchers and community. We propose that for each research project, this relationship can best be understood as a ‘sphere of engagement’, after Ingold’s ‘sphere of nurture’, and that trust and care are emergent and binding qualities of this sphere. Tracing the development of trust relationships in a case study, using the idea of security-based trust and harmony-based trust, we conclude that trust, and the related concept of care, bind together people, events, histories and futures beyond the dichotomous and time-delimited relationship of a research contract, and carry the sphere of engagement of researchers and community beyond the life of any one project.
We call ourselves Yandaarra, which is Gumbaynggirr for a group shifting camp together. We are Aunty Shaa Smith, story holder for Gumbaynggirr Country (mid-north Coast, NSW, Australia), her daughter, Neeyan Smith and three non-Indigenous academics. In this article, we share the meaning of Yandaarra for our work together. We see Yandaarra as binding beings together, living the protocols of Maangun, the Law, of the Dreaming. We do not talk of Dreaming to imply we were, or are, asleep, but to share this story as part of the creation time, that exists now. For we see Yandaarra, our research, as a re-creation story. It’s about remembering what was/is as part of re-creating, rebinding, remaking protocols as we honour Elders and custodians, human/non-human, past, present and future. Importantly too, our collaboration requires us to know our place and our different histories as Gumbaynggirr and non-Gumbaynggirr people living and working on unceded land. Our focus in Yandaarra is to learn to care for Country and ourselves from a Gumbaynggirr perspective. We are at a stage where radical change is necessary, and Gumbaynggirr wisdom can help create a new pathway of how to live on and with Mother Earth as kin.
Using the six pillars approach to Futures Studies, this report presents findings from a two day foresight workshop focused on Aboriginal workforce futures. The workshop was held in Australia. The scenarios developed were: (1) "We could die out", (2) "Struggling snail", (3) "Our numbers and powers are increasing", (4) "People first, governed by Tjukulpa?," and, (5) "Uber BabaKiueria". The main desired narrative shift was from the "Mainstream way the only show in town" to "Aboriginal people are the solution to their own destiny.".
Portrayals of the Anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives can erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literature on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by nonIndigenous persons, such as the Holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies' narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies' capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples.
Although historians have provided substantial insights into the structure, development and activities of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, they have rarely focused on the complex and sensitive issue of Aboriginal recruitment. A careful reading of historical records, however, identifies several methods, including coercion, intimidation, kidnapping and inducement, as well as "voluntary" enlistment. It is difficult to identify Aboriginal agency in recruitment processes as the records are entirely one-sided-the voices of the troopers themselves are absent from the archival sources. In this article, we examine the cultural and historical contexts of Aboriginal recruitment-for example, the dire social situations of Aboriginal survivors of the frontier war and the absence of future survival options for the potential recruits. We explore, through the framework of historical trauma, the impacts on vulnerable victims of violence and other devastating effects of colonisation. We conclude that the recruitment of Aboriginal troopers was far from a homogeneous or transparent process and that the concept of agency with regard to those who can be considered war victims themselves is extremely complex. Unravelling the diverse, conflicting and often controversial meanings of this particular colonial activity remains a challenge to the historical process.
This article presents the major aspects of hauntology, highlighting the impact of spectrality studies on contemporary redefinitions of knowledge and cognition. Referring predominantly to Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993), we discuss the ways in which the spectral turn has led to a “cognitive crisis” of sorts by radically questioning the existing procedures of knowing and re-configuring the prevalent conceptualization of time and history. Approaching the spectre as a conceptual site of difference and otherness, we comment on the ethical dimensions of spectrality studies and the questions of (in)visibility, representation of as well as responsibility for the Other, the marginalised or the silenced. We also stress the contribution of the psychoanalytic concepts explaining psychological reactions to loss—the metapsychic phantom and the intrapsychic crypt—to the development of trauma and memory studies. In all of these concerns, we are primarily interested in outlining the transformative potential of the figure of the spectre and its influence on methods of study in contemporary scholarship.
We know that the complex sustainability challenges facing our society today, including water and food security, poverty and climate change impacts, cannot be effectively tackled from a single disciplinary perspective. ‘Transdisciplinarity’ has emerged as a way of addressing these apparently intractable problems. Growing international interest in transdisciplinary approaches to research and practice, four decades of academic discourse and a significant body of work in this area, provide the background and opportunity for a specific focus on the practical application of transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability issues.
Deserts have a special prominence in apocalyptic visions of the future. As a trope, the desert frequently indexes apocalyptic visions of the warming planet and future challenges of securing food, energy, and water in a changing environment. This article considers how diffuse visions of "environmental apocalypse" are spun through narratives constructions of the desert as sites of utopia and dystopia-places where humanity is simultaneously portrayed as meeting its most dire possibilities of collapse, but also places where hopeful futures might be tested out and extremes overcome in an era of climate catastrophe. This article offers a genealogy of techno-scientific schemes in the Arizona desert and the "visioneers" behind them, focusing on the most iconic example of Biosphere 2. Initiated in the mid-1980s, Biosphere 2's history illustrates how such projects are underpinned by multiple forms of spectacle, which draw on the ideals of science, technology, and environmental salvation to build settler colonial structures of exclusion and Indigenous dispossession. By centering the question of whose apocalypse we are being sold in such techno-centric "solutions" to ecological dilemmas, this article expands recent discussions of environmental injustice and settler colonial violence to show how ostensibly "progressive" ideals and initiatives are also violent and routinely overwrite histories and presents of colonial dispossession.
We investigate the nature and potential of strategy in governance and emphasize the importance of understanding strategy in its (potential) relations to long-term perspectives or narratives about the long term. Strategy is understood as both a narrative and an institution itself. Narratives about the long term, both inside and outside the sphere of governance, have to be mapped and acknowledged. This can inspire, in strategy formulation, a link to such existing perspectives or the production of a new one. Such strategy ought to be persuasive enough to coordinate action and create reality effects. We focus on strategy which aims to guide complex governance configurations associated with a set of actors, institutions and collective goals. The double nature of governance strategy enables it to coordinate other institutions and narratives, and from there, to coordinate, even integrate policy domains. That might be a sine qua non for dealing with long-term threats and the pursuit of public goods. The longest term might be the most relevant yet the least knowable and the most difficult to steer towards with existing governance tools. Nonetheless, evolving strategy, evolving assessment of linkages to long-term perspectives and possible forms of policy integration might be our best way forward.
We propose a new scenario archetypes method generated by extracting a set of archetypal images of the future from a sample of 140 science fiction films set in the future using a grounded theory analytical procedure. Six archetypes emerged from the data, and were named Growth & Decay, Threats & New Hopes, Wasteworlds, The Powers that Be, Disarray, and Inversion. The archetypes in part overlap with and confirm previous research, and in part are novel. They all involve stresspoint critical conditions in the external environment. We explain why the six archetypes, as a foresight framework, is more transformational and nuanced than previously developed scenario archetypes frameworks, making it particularly suited to the current necessity to think the unthinkable
more systematically. We explain how the six archetypes framework can be used as
predetermined images of the future to create domain specific scenarios, making organizations more resilient to critical, disruptive futures. We finally present and discuss a case study of the application of the method to create scenarios of post-Covid-19 futures of work.
While ‘place-making’ is a productive concept for many scholars, I consider land relations and research through Indigenous (re)making by narrating embodied and experiential ethnographic approaches. Through (re)making, one reimagines ethnography and ethnographic practices with Indigenous land and Indigenous land practices that work to contribute to forms of decolonial healing and Indigenous survivance. In consideration of the wounds among multiple bodies, not only humans, for which large-scale settler-colonial agricultural plantations in Hawai’i and the Sonoran Desert are responsible, this work discusses possibilities for (re)making toward healing with land. Song, poetry, and story are the agents who make such engagements with many more-than-(but including)-human collaborators translatable. As such, it asks how an understanding of ethnography in the contexts of Indigenous science and technology studies that cares about environmental research might shift the ways in which methodologies are formed and ‘data’ is shaped. And it asks how ethnographic practitioners might better affirm the plights, journeys, cycles, relations, and encounters that more-than-human beings experience, remember, hold, and live. This is one contribution among many that attend to the variety of ways in which ethnographic texts are formed and understood in Indigenous research practices that challenge Euro-Western genres and structures of knowledge production, and how/with whom such knowledges and practices are co-created.
This important collection of essays gives us cause to reflect on postcolonial and settler colonial studies, their impact and legacies. In this reflection and response, I read this against the recent calls to reconsider the nebulous concept of ‘Australian values’ as a defining principle of belonging in and to the nation-state. Echoing the 1950s ‘Australian way of life’ discourse, these values are overwhelmingly white, European and middle class. The place of Indigenous people in this conversation is both unclear and unsettled. As a settler colony, Australia has struggled to accommodate, celebrate or reconcile the relationship between the nation’s ‘First people’. Settler colonial theory, and what Patrick Wolfe called the ‘elimination of the native’, can be a useful lens for considering these issues. However, it is also clear that settler colonial theory has not attracted Indigenous scholars as it might have been expected to do. I briefly consider the place and role of Indigenous people in these debates and the shifts that have taken place over the past few decades.
The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignties alongside each other. By examining the imposition of restrictions on Chinese people’s capacity to work and to employ Aboriginal labour in Darwin around 1911, I locate a racialised labour politics and capitalism as central to the obstruction and production of sovereignties. In doing so, this article engages with two recent criticisms of settler colonial studies: one that impresses upon scholars the need to write not only of settlers but also of Indigenous peoples; and another that insists on attending to the specific conditions of settlers of colour or precariously racialised migrants to settler colonies.
This article foregrounds the activist memory projects of four Indigenous women artists, recorded as part of a digital storytelling project in 2018. These memory projects collectively represent a refusal of settler colonial frameworks and a grounding in Indigenous knowledges, which challenge institutional understandings of the archive and dominant conceptions of memory. Through close reading and analysis, we argue that these storytellers’ practices – rooted in Land, body, ancestral relations, and creativity – are not efforts to simply right the colonial archive, nor are they insertions into colonial narratives; instead, they remember differently, with distinct modes and mechanisms for accessing, producing and circulating memory. Their work, in concert with Indigenous scholars cited throughout this article, extends not only the epistemological basis of the archive. It also expands the ontology of memory: pushing memory scholars to expand their understandings of what is possible to remember, and how memory is accessed and shared.
We are members of the Creatures Collective, a transnational group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, activists, artists, and communities who are collaborating to challenge the world-breaking violence of extinction by directly and collaboratively fostering alternatives to the dominant biodiversity-conservation paradigm. In this collection, we ask how, as co-researchers with(in) Indigenous communities, we can contribute to the remaking of relationships that foster more-than-human accountability, reciprocity, and capacities for resistance. We call these relationships living protocols – living not just in the sense that they are vitally alive, responsive, and regenerative, but also in the sense that we aim to actively live them by supporting those who enact and (re)make them. Based on collaborative research in so-called Australia, Canada, Malaysia, the Philippines, and the US, our essays seek to manifest research that is (or aims to be) collaborative, embedded in mutualistic, interpersonal, more-than-human relationships, and thus co-constitutive of the worlds those relationships sustain. By bringing these collaborations into dialogue with feminist, neomaterialist, decolonial, and Indigenous geographies, we aim to provoke discussion of how researchers across disciplines might contribute to the remaking of worlds in which plural life forms can co-exist – even in the face of transversal world-breaking.
Reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia is defined officially as consisting of 'two-way relationships built on trust and respect', recognition and acceptance of rights, histories and cultures, and institutional and community support for 'all dimensions' of reconciliation. We suggest, after Alexandre Da Costa (2016. The (un)happy objects of affective community. Cultural studies, 30, 24-46), that the burden of supporting reconciliation is borne differentially by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; it is seen by the latter as an apparently 'happy object' in Sara Ahmed's sense, but as an 'unhappy object' for many Aboriginal Australians, who have argued that it requires first a process of makarrata, or peace-making. Traditionally this has included some reciprocal pain for perpetrators, and we suggest here that the desire of many Aboriginal people to develop a public heritage of massacre sites and former 'fringe camps' offers an opportunity for non-Indigenous people to take hold of, and hold onto, a prickly and difficult past as part of a process of makarrata.
The Aurukun archives held at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies were initially developed in accordance with a ‘before it is too late’ model. In response to national controversy over proposed bauxite mining on Wik land, the Institute reorientated its documentation strategy towards collaborating with the Aurukun community. Wik people were not so much the subjects of the archive, but collaborators in its production. The outcome was an extensive multimedia archive which underpinned the Wik native title claim in 1993. Since then the collaborative relationship between the Institute and the Wik people has lapsed. Intermittent attempts to repatriate parts of the Aurukun archives were not successful in the long term. While revising controls over key Aurukun record groups, current Institute staff became aware of the extent and some of the strengths of the Aurukun archives. The staff have been attempting to revive the community’s awareness of their archives and their interest in them. Although the community’s interests presently have a different focus, revived collaboration between the Institute and the Aurukun community could result in some form of distributed custody and control of the Aurukun archives which may be of value to Wik society.
The dynamic relationship between Aboriginal groups and ethnic immigrants in Australia remains theoretically unconstructed as it largely falls outside the binaries of race and ethnicity. Historically, Aboriginal people have developed longstanding contacts with Asian groups, traversing national, cultural, sexual and legislative boundaries. Although indigeneity and diaspora embody disparate and even opposite meanings, there are synergies between diasporic identities and Aboriginal people who suffer from dislocation due to the enduring impact of colonisation and migration. The postcolonial adaptation of liminality or threshold may provide an apt framework for theorising the literary representation of a convergence of border-crossing and diasporic experiences of Aboriginal and Asian Australians in the marginal, interstitial and in-between spaces. Due to a shared predicament and a sense of comradeship, Aboriginal–Asian encounters forge communitas, which does not suggest inherent subversiveness or unproblematic co-option. This paper considers Ubby’s Underdogs (2011, 2013) by Brenton E. McKenna and A Most Peculiar Act (2014) by Marie Munkara to explore Aboriginal–Asian relations under the White Australia policy. Through the recurrent theme of Japanese and imaginary Chinese invasions, these novels complicate the crossings in the porous and precarious borderlands, remap the intersecting power relations and reroute Aboriginal characters back to the centre.
Visual representations of colonial violence constitute an overlooked source of evidence that, although shaped by contemporary visual and cultural conventions, allow us to engage with this troubling history in significant ways. The “history wars” of the turn of the millennium have been accused of focusing on disciplinary protocols with the effect of obscuring the moral implications of colonial invasion and dispossession. By contrast, images evoke empathy, creating social relationships across the British Empire that defined identities and aligned viewers with specific communities. Images also return the modern viewer to the emotional and moral intensity of 1830s and 1840s frontier violence in south-eastern Australia. They map colonial “blind spots” by demonstrating the ways that these emotions were politicised to legitimate colonial interests, for example, by directing sympathy towards white colonists, or seeking to evoke compassion for Aboriginal people. From our present-day perspective, these visual images help us to see our “reflection”, and acknowledge the truth of our history and its legacies.
The stories told about ‘extinction’ matter greatly: they embody theories about what is causing the global-scale destruction of plants, animals and other beings, and what might stop it. Dominant Western scientific stories/theories frame this phenomenon as the unintended result of desirable human activities. They prescribe the scientific management of remaining ‘biodiversity’ within structures driven by colonization, extractivism and other violent logics. In contrast, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Nêhiyaw and many other Indigenous stories/theories that address this issue understand ‘extinction’ as an expression of the breaking of laws, treaties and protocols between particular peoples, plants, animals, land, water and other beings. This relation-breaking violence is embedded in everyday manifestations of colonial violence and in the genocides of humans and nonhuman peoples. Centring Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, Nêhiyaw and critical Western/settler stories/theories, this contribution argues that halting ‘extinction’ means not only dismantling structures of law-breaking and structural violence, but also repairing the relations that those laws, treaties and protocols uphold. It also honours the efforts of Indigenous resurgents doing the crucial work of repairing these relations.
Aboriginal involvement in World War I is at once complex and full of contradictions. During the Great War, many Aboriginal people and communities were keen to enlist and supportive of the war effort while others spoke out against conscription and the war. It is important to trace Aboriginal voices both during and after the war to comprehend what Aboriginal people had to say about the conflict. This article seeks to provide answers to some of these tantalising issues, and snapshots of the Aboriginal WWI experience. These complex stories will fill gaps in the mythic Australian First World War narrative.
In this article I assume that denial is particularly marked in settler societies since their very foundations lie in the dispossession, destruction and displacement of aboriginal peoples and they have never experienced any event like those that have forced other nations to repudiate the oppressive discourses that lie at their heart. Examining the case of Australia I argue that there are intriguing connections between historical denial and contemporary denial and suggest that the former has been especially marked in this case because of the nature of the latter. I contend that the nature of remembering and forgetting depended a great deal on the nature of the cultures of memory, historical discourses, and the disciplines or genres that story-tellers chose to relate their stories about the past, paying particular attention to the peculiar manner in which these conceived of the relationship between the past and the present in such a way as to render Aboriginal people as though they were out of time and so out of place in Australia. Finally, I trace a revolutionary change in the nation’s culture of memory in recent decades, which has seen Aboriginal people and culture assume a central place in the nation’s history-making.
Wilcannia is a small town in outback New South Wales. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century, this was a jewel of colonisation known as the ‘Queen of the Desert’. On the Darling River, it was the third largest shipping port in NSW. Large, monumental sandstone buildings are littered through the town, many crumbling, for Wilcannia has now been mostly abandoned by settler society. The town’s present population of around 600 people are mostly Barkindji. Aboriginal residents of Wilcannia are not thriving by many official measures, but have maintained continuous occupation of their land. Many are conscious that they have survived the ‘logic of elimination’ characteristic of settler colonialism. We went to Wilcannia to explore the political economics of this survival, especially the ways that Aboriginal people perceived and engaged with settler capitalism. Did capitalism fail in Wilcannia? Or were Aboriginal strategies of engagement and resistance effective? This paper draws on a rich oral history project and archive to offer a complex, Indigenous-centred account of settler capitalism in the region and of the structures that constitute a changing, flexible and distinctly Barkindji logic of survival. This, we argue, cannot be reduced to ‘agency’, as if Aboriginal responses to settler colonial structures were ad hoc – meaning interpretations of the ‘hybridity’ of Aboriginal and settler cultures are also not applicable. Rather, we suggest that the logic of survival represents an Indigenous structure with changing, flexible and heterogeneous sets of strategies.
Website of Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788-1872, including web maps, 3d terrain views, interactive timelines, related data and supporting evidence.
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/
http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1340762
This essay explores the stories and lies told to children during the Holocaust, and how these operate as forms of preparation and protection within and outside the narrative. In Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) and Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) parents seek to protect children from the knowledge of war, but this prevents anxiety-preparation. In contrast, the historical document Fairy Tales from Auschwitz does not deny the horrific reality of life in the camp, but uses the fairy tale genre as a reassurance of morality and survival.
Colonialism, between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, has produced a profound and extensive rearrangement of physical spaces and peoples. Moved by force of circumstance or necessity as migrants, slaves, indentured labourers, convicts, refugees or seekers of wealth, millions of people, entire societies in some cases, were reorganised during the colonial era. This has left an enduring and unresolved legacy in the socalled postcolonial present, for in most cases, Indigenous societies and First Peoples were already present in the places to which people moved. As a result new meaning and social demography had to be carved and asserted over existing and enduring Indigenous spaces. It is this historical process of remaking space, and the intricacies of interaction — violent, ideological and cultural — between colonising and colonised peoples that is explored by the essays, poems and narratives in this collection. Centring around the Pacific Ocean, with its proliferation of settler colonies, contributors take us through an expanse of time, place and region to piece together interwoven but discrete case-studies that illuminate the transnational threads and local experiences that produced, or made colonial space.
The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism. Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines. © 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved.
A comprehensive history of Australian Aboriginal whaling and sealing. For most Australian Aboriginal people the impact of colonialism was blunt-dispossession, dislocation, disease, murder and missionisation. Yet there is another story of Australian history that has remained untold, A story of enterprise and entrepreneurship and Aboriginal people seizing the opportunity to profit from life at seas as sealers and whalers. In some cases participation was voluntary; in others it was more invidious and involved kidnapping and trade in women. In all cases the individuals involved maintained and exercised their personal autonomy and agency within their new circumstances. This book explores some of the lives and adventures of those Aboriginal people who became roving mariners. The techniques used to delve into these stories are a combination of individual stories, analysis of diaries and journals, and an exploration of European artifacts housed in museum collections. The sources for these stories are the archival records of maritime industry, captains' logs, ships' records, recollections of sailors and the reflections of those who took to the sea. Much of what is known about this period comes from the writings of Herman Melville, and in this book Melville's whaling novels act as a prism through which relations onboard ships are understood. As such Roving Mariners uses both history and literature to explore the lives, lifestyles, friendships, and sexual relationships that these people formed.
Drawing on research in de-industrialised coal-mining communities in the north of England, this article focuses on how experiences of some young people might be approached through a notion of precarity linked to the idea of a ‘social haunting’ of the coalfields. Concentrating on data gathered in the period after the 2010 change of UK government, the article considers how localities suffering under the impact of ‘austerity’ measures have also witnessed moments of vivid, carnivalesque resurgence linked to celebrations of the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 and of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike during 2014–2015. These celebrations mark a watershed in the cultural and affective life of the communities, one aspect of which relates to how young people with very different educational trajectories have become involved alongside each other in those events as a result of their different experiences of precarity.
There has always been a critical, emancipatory tradition within futures studies. Although those voices can still be heard, there has been a growing tendency for futures studies to be driven by more utilitarian needs in business and government. Whilst it is positive that futures thinking and research is increasingly valued within corporate and policy-making settings, much of that work appears to lack genuine plurality of worldviews and interests.
The paper traces the changing contexts for futures research over the past 25 years. It argues that futures research needs to be viewed as part of the re-politicisation – in the Habermasian sense – of technocratic decision-making. It suggests that there are three particular reasons for revisiting the need for criticality in futures research: the increasing acknowledgement of systemic interrelatedness (ecological, social, economic), a growth in the forward-looking socio-economic paradigm that permeates both business and policy, and the challenge of theory development. Drawing on social theory and futures research, we suggest three pathways for revived critical futures research: socio-technical practices, future-oriented dialectics, and socio-economic imaginaries. As a result, the paper calls for development in futures studies that would dialectically integrate and overcome the dichotomy between instrumentalisation and (critical) theorising that can be currently understood as somewhat antagonistic. In order to find a balance between these antagonistic dimensions, futures research should be more engaged in enabling critique and revealing assumptions and interests.
Affect permeates understandings of racial and cultural mixture as well as racial democracy in Brazil. Sentiments of interconnectedness, harmony and conviviality shape the ways in which Brazilians of diverse races/colours feel identity and belonging. These sentiments also drive hopeful attachments to possibilities for moving beyond race, influencing how people encounter and relate to racism and inequality. However, studies of race in Brazil tend to either take the affective for granted as positive unifying force or ignore its role in shaping the appeal of dominant racial discourses on identity, nation and belonging. Through an examination of the different ways people feel, experience and live orientations towards mixture and racial democracy as the dominant affective community, this paper analyzes the role the affective plays in constituting racial ideologies and shaping anti-racist action. I explore the ways histories of race, racism, privilege and disadvantage generate unequal attachments to and experien...
The paper argues that life stories and histories offer different perspectives on the past, with implications for studying the future. A life is proposed as a form of “social site” (Marston, S.A., J.P. Jones III & K. Woodward 2005, 'Human geography without scale', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 30, pp. 416-432.) where the future is met and negotiated. Unlike the broad sweep of historical narrative, a focus on the site of a life can reveal cumulative losses, futures denied and paths not taken. Life stories challenge historical narrative with alternative futures that ‘might-have-been’; they might therefore usefully be added as a more experimental type to Inayatullah’s taxonomy of historical “traces” (Inayatullah, S. 2012, 'Humanity 3000: A comparative analysis of methodological approaches to forecasting the long-term', Foresight, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 401-417).
A case study based on a life story from Aceh is used to demonstrate ways in which alternative futures can emerge from life stories and then be acted upon. The paper concludes that the experimental power of life stories as historical traces lies not only in the stories themselves but in the unique event of storytelling and its potentially transformative impact on the teller and listener, and hence the future.
This essay offers a set of reflections on the meaning of reconciliation in the context of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In particular, this essay asks about the relation between ideas of reconciliation and the originating wound toward which reconciliation work is directed. It is here argued that, in the case of the United States, the wound of slavery calls for "conciliation," not "reconciliation." If we conceive political community to be a kind of friendship, then the originating wound of the United States (and perhaps the Americas as a whole) calls for a first friendship, not the repair or remaking of relations suggested by the term "reconciliation."