Reconciliation as a Frame for Rethinking Racism in Australia

This paper begins with a brief reading of Australia's ‘signature racism’ and ponders the question of what we might do about it. As a novel way to this problematic, the paper considers the national reconciliation process, exemplified by the work as of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR), as a ‘good movement’ in Derrida's terms and as a site for investigating antiracist work in Australia. The CAR provides conceptual resources for considering the pedagogical challenge for a cultural politics of antiracism. Importantly the challenge is understood in terms of a terrain of affect in which in which anger is simultaneously silenced, repressed and denied. The paper concludes by contemplating the possibility of a post-indignation pedagogy.