Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia: Reflecting upon ACRAWSA’s Symposium

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Justice on 2018-08-04 00:59Z by Steven

Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia: Reflecting upon ACRAWSA’s Symposium

Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
2018-07-18

Charlotte Sefton, Ph.D., Arab and Islamic Studies
University of Exeter

At the close of her paper, entitled ‘Navigating Power with Poetry on the Hazardous Drive toward Decolonisation’, Carolyn D’Cruz posed the vital question of whether, or not, the work of decolonisation can be pursued through engagement with nation-state level Politics. Her question recalled my recent viewing of Angela Davis and Gayatri Spivak in conversation at the Akademie der Künste on a panel entitled ‘Planetary Utopias – Hope, Desire Imaginaries in a Postcolonial World’. 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 ‘the bourgeois nation-state, ensconced as it is in capitalism, would never be able to do the work of ensuring justice’; Spivak, in response, had questioned the real-world utility of refusing to engage it; asserting that our work is, instead, to ‘insert the subaltern into the circuit of citizenship’, that is into a structure that they could ‘work within’ 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 ‘any aspect’ of the State as she understood it; Spivak maintained that the State must be seen through a more complexed lens, as both ‘poison and medicine’. AWCRAWSA’s latest symposium, ‘Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia’ provided important interventions to these broader debates in decolonial thought and practice…

…Opening the symposium, Irene Watson made central to her keynote ‘Thinking Relationally about Race, Blackness and Indigeneity in Australia’ 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. The non-survival (the genocide) of Indigenous people is the only way the State survives. As Nikki Moodie would later assert in her paper ‘Decolonizing Race Theory: Place, Survivance & Sovereignity’, echoing Patrick Wolfe, the Settler-Colonial State as such can only function through a logic of elimination. The State’s 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’s professions to the contrary, there has been no decolonisation of Australia; not least because the ‘hierarchy of voice’ established by colonialism remains; thus the violent silencing and erasure of Indigenous peoples – and their calls for self-determination – also remains. Indeed, both the idea and formation of ‘the State’ 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…

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Historicising Whiteness: From the Case of Late Colonial India

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive on 2013-03-10 05:16Z by Steven

Historicising Whiteness: From the Case of Late Colonial India

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 2, Number 1 (2006) Whiteness and the Horizons of Race

Satoshi Mizutani

It has been a while since critical race and whiteness studies have disseminated the now-familiar notion that whiteness is not a given but a social construct. The idea, however, is yet to be fully explored, with many untouched areas and methodologies of potential importance. This paper is a humble attempt to make a contribution to the field from the perspective of colonial history. Drawing on a historical case study on British Indian society from the late nineteenth century onwards, it firstly focuses on the oft-neglected social world of white colonials of ‘respectable’ standing, enquiring what defined their whiteness and under what material conditions it was to be acquired. This is to be followed by an examination of how these whites differentiated themselves from, and in turn controlled the lives of, the so-called ‘domiciled’ population, members of which were of white descent, permanently based in India, often impoverished and frequently (if not always) racially mixed. Such a two-level approach to the people of white descent is to reveal that the colonial invention of whiteness depended both on the securing of a ‘bourgeois’ social milieu for middle-class whites and on the vigilant control of the impoverished domiciled. The paper shows the complex ways in which the insidiously unsound nature of such a construction of whiteness repeatedly posed a political challenge to the colonial racial order. The case of colonial India may be taken as a vivid example of how whiteness may come charged with inevitable self contradictions and ambiguities, and with those counter-measures that seek to contain the socio-political unrest resulting there from.

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Examining ‘Latinidad’ in Latin America: Race, ‘Latinidad’ and the Decolonial Option

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2013-03-10 03:56Z by Steven

Examining ‘Latinidad’ in Latin America: Race, ‘Latinidad’ and the Decolonial Option

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 8, Number 2, (2012) Directions and Intersections
11 pages

Eugenia Demuro, Visiting Fellow
School of Language Studies, College of Arts and Social Sciences
Australian National University

This article provides a critical account of the idea of race, conceived of and derived from European colonisers in the New World. The paper argues that race became a crucial category to the colonising projects of the New World, and in particular in the distribution of power during colonialism. The paper further examines how the notion of Latinidad (Latinity), entrenched in the term Latin America, continued to enact a discourse of racial superiority/inferiority even after the battles for Independence had taken place. Employing the critical vocabulary and framework of Decolonial theory, the paper introduces key arguments against Western European universality, and calls for a re-reading of the processes that structure privilege across racial and ethnic lines.

Introduction

Following the conquest and colonisation of the Americas, the concept of race, as a category, became instrumental to social organisation and, significantly, continues to be a powerful stratagem today. This is clearly evident in the idea of Latinidad (Latinity) that underscores the nomenclature ‘Latin America’, which continues to elevate European heritage to the detriment of all other racial or ethnic groups. We can see this, for example, in the fact that whilst an Aymaran Amerindian from Bolivia may not share much with an Afro-Cuban from Santiago, or with a porteño from Buenos Aires, or a Mexican from Tijuana, each is deemed to be Latin American. Given the cultural heterogeneity of the region, it seems imprecise to speak of Latin America as though there were no marked differences between the nations, regions, cultures and peoples of the huge landmass that extends from the south of Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego. It is difficult to employ the term Latin America with any validity for a number of reasons: to reiterate, it is the referent of an incredibly vast and heterogeneous region; additionally, the term emerged as the result of conflicts between imperial nations and was hence applied to the region from outside (see Mignolo 2005); and, most importantly, the very idea of Latinidad functions to define Latin American identity in relation to the European heritages, and erases and marginalises the racial and cultural diversity of people residing in Latin America. For these reasons, the term Latin America and its continued usage must be seen as part of a larger program of coloniality that began with the inception of the Americas as the New World in the 15th century, and that continues today through global, Western capitalism and its accompanying epistemology. In Latin America, the colonial project that began with the arrival of Europeans did not end with the cessation of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. In fact, coloniality persists today and is evident in the distribution of wealth and resources across the region and the globe…

…The Emergence of Race

For Europe, the so-called discovery of America opened vast territories to be appropriated, riches to be extracted, and inhabitants to be indoctrinated into European culture and Catholicism. For the indigenous peoples of the New World, the conquest and colonisation meant complete domination, and went hand-in-hand with slavery, serfdom, genocide and the overall destruction of previously existing social formations. It goes without saying that the destruction of culture also meant the destruction of knowledge/s and worldviews that differed from that of the Europeans. The legitimizing discourse of this enterprise, based on the supposed superiority of the European colonisers and the supposed inferiority of the dominated, rested on a newly emergent notion of race.

The classification Indio to refer to the vast numbers of societies and civilisations not only obscured the differences between the groups which inhabited the region, it served as the construction of an identity whose main purpose was to differentiate the indigenous from the colonisers. The term summarised a category that was entirely negative and inferior. The same process was repeated when it came to the people transported as slaves from Africa, although they came from different regions and belonged to different groups—Ashantis, Yorubas, Congos, etc.—in the colonial period they became Negros (Quijano 2000: 551-2). Both Indios and Negros were conceived as inferior identities to their European counterparts, and this inferiority was defined specifically in terms of their race. These identities became configured in asymmetrical relations of power within the new colonial system; they had a corresponding place within the colonial hierarchies, the organisation of labour, and corresponding social roles. Both Indios and Negros existed outside the domain of civilised society, as a repository of labour to be exploited for the advantage of Europeans. Interestingly, race became associated with colour, perhaps as one of the most salient differences of phenotype, and social organisation and privilege can be traced to a gradient of colour: the darker the subject the lesser freedom they exercised and possessed. In this way, the concept of race was instrumental to conquest and colonisation: there is a direct link between the idea of race that emerged at the onset of the conquest of the Americas—and that was later spread around the world—and the division and organisation of labour. From the beginning, the distribution of wealth, power, domination and resources was established in terms of the newly invented categories of identity that the concept of race facilitated—Indio, Negro, Mestizo, Spanish, Portuguese, European. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this emergence of race as a new mode of power, efficiently employed as a means to codify the relationship between the conquerors and the conquered, and to justify the atrocities, and the violence, that the conquest and colonial enterprise entailed…

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The Myth of Post-Racialism: Hegemonic and Counterhegemonic Stories About Race and Racism in the United States

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2013-03-10 00:36Z by Steven

The Myth of Post-Racialism: Hegemonic and Counterhegemonic Stories About Race and Racism in the United States

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2011) (Special Issue: Post-Racial States)
pages 2-25

Babacar M’Baye, Associate Professor of Pan-African Literature and Culture
Kent State University

In the United States, hegemonic narratives reproduce post-racial ideals by developing popular myths that either minimise the prevalence of racial inequalities or blame their persistence on African Americans, who are represented as dysfunctional and resistant to mainstream American culture. Hegemonic narratives are not only racist and prejudiced but also deceptive because they move race away from the unequal policies that produce structural-level inequities for lower and working class African Americans, putting the latter at a greater disadvantage in relationships to middle and upper class white Americans and African Americans. Hegemonic stories are misleading since they claim that racial equality is possible even when the majority of white Americans have a claim to socioeconomic and political privilege and have a vested interest in maintaining that advantage at the expense of others. Using both past and recent critical race theories, this article critically analyses the major differences between hegemonic stories which accept the myth of post-racialism in the United States and counterhegemonic stories which contest this myth. By analysing these stories, the essay reveals the racially disadvantageous conditions the majority of blacks in the United States continue to face despite the 2008 election of a black president. The essay identifies persistent structural racism that the myth of post-racialism seeks to efface. It also suggests that American social and economic institutions work to entrap African Americans and other non-white minorities into a racist prison industrial complex, limited education and health facilities and rampant poverty which drastically reduce their opportunities in the United States.

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