Postcolonial reproductions: disability,indigeneity and the formation of the white masculine settler state of Australia

There has been a growing debate within the broad field of postcolonial scholarship which seeks to challenge both its territorial boundaries with the advent of globalization and its limitations when applied to the realm of white-settler societies. The debate has been extremely fruitful in situating emerging scholarship that seeks to extend postcoloniality, its theoretical framing, and the internal processes of social categorization for peoples caught within the nation-state's territorial sphere. Unfortunately, disability and indigeneity remain largely absent from these fresh debates; or when included, are explored as singular fields of analytical inquiry with little intersectional dialogue. With this paper, I aim to extend these nascent debates by critically engaging with both disability and indigeneity as two interlocking sites of (post)colonial nation-state power. To explicate this argument, my analysis focuses on a key historical moment in the Australian experience – the formation of the colonial white-settler society of Australia in its early years (1901–1920s), comparing and contrasting the systems of administrative management of disability and indigeneity. In doing so, the paper reveals the deep materialities of white, able-bodied, masculine, (post)colonial settler rule that bring together disability and indigeneity via gender reproductive controls. The conclusion reflects on the transformative effects of managing transgressive bodies and minds under the white able-bodied settler state and the potential this opens to negotiate practices of solidarity.     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

Suspect community or suspect category? The impact of counter-terrorism as ‘policed multiculturalism’

How to think about the impact of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on ethnic and religious accommodation? Much of the literature draws on the concept of ‘suspect community’, suggesting it has primarily alienated the Muslim community, favouring an assimilationist model of ‘muscular liberalism’. In this article, while I consider the merits of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis, I argue that it only partially accounts for the effects of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation on multicultural societies. I contend that much of the literature has focused too narrowly on the discriminatory effects of counter-terrorist policies and has been unable to grasp the more insidious political effects of counter-terrorism policies based on the active participation and involvement of Muslims in their own policing. The main hypothesis of this paper is that rather than promoting ‘assimilation’, as the government would expect, or alienation, as the advocates of the ‘suspect community’ hypothesis would contend, counter-terrorist policies produce and reinforce a government of society in discrete and divided ethno-religious groups. Such ‘policed multiculturalism’—understood as the recognition and the management of diversity through a security perspective—has an important consequence in that it removes fundamental questions about pluralism from political debate, casting them instead in a depoliticised language of security.     

Orientalising deafness: race and disability in imperial Britain

This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impairment radically reconfigured in the colonial period, and inflected with concerns about degeneration, belonging, heredity and difference. Disability, I argue, not only operated as an additional ‘category of difference’ alongside ‘race’ as a way of categorising and subjugating the various ‘others’ of Empire, but intersected with it. The ‘colonisation’ of disabled people in Britain and the ‘racial other’ by the British were not simply simultaneous processes or even analogous ones, but were part and parcel of the same cultural and discursive system. The colonising context of the nineteenth century, a period when British political, economic and cultural expansion over areas of South Asia, Australasia and Africa increased markedly, structured the way in which all forms of difference were recognised and expressed, including the difference of deafness. So too did the shifts in the raced and gendered thinking that accompanied it, as new forms of knowledge were developed to justify, explain and contest Britain's global position and new languages were developed through which to articulate otherness. Such developments reconfigured the meaning of disability. Disability was, in effect, ‘orientalised’. ‘Race’ I argue was formative in shaping what we have come to understand as ‘disability’ and vice versa; they were related fantasies of difference.     

‘Being while black’: resistance and the management of the self

‘Being while black’ is ultimately an ‘everyday revolution’, Despite the fact that people manage their selves by their own choosing, especially as their desires are being shaped (Foucault, 1977), their selves remains the basic revolutionary unit. Foucault's oeuvre on power and concept of dressage is utilized to explain racial profiling of blacks of what I call ‘racial dressage’, intended primarily to discipline the ‘black body’ (el-Khoury, 2009). In this paper, I argue that despite this false sense of presence of power and internalized social-control, blacks actively construct their day-to-day activities as a discursive object of resistance. Critical awareness to racial oppression is in itself is a form of opposition to it (Collins, 1990). I argue that social control and resistance are coproduced. Using discursive analysis of interviews I identified the following modes of resistance: disposition to steadiness (constituting an ethical self, sustaining an internal dialogue, and emotional management), rejecting criminalizing identities, discursive consciousness, refusing the spatial power, and lastly disbelief in the system. Ultimately, blacks live against ‘themselves’ and this is because the soul that has become the prison of the body, is being dismantled (Luxon, 2008).     

The ‘new Chinatown’: the racialization of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Singapore

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to ‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity. I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power. Rather, Singaporean-Chinese' construction of a ‘new Chinatown’ ironically acts to displace them.     

The racialisation of African youth in Australia

In this paper I argue that patterns of reporting on ‘African youth’ in Australia show how both the constraints under which the media operates and the wider sources of institutional racism contribute to new applications of racialising frames. I seek to establish specific patterns of racialisation through an analysis of newspaper articles appearing in Melbourne over a roughly two month period when media attention was focused on a series of violent incidents in which African refugees were identified as either victims or perpetrators. Initial reporting is determined by journalistic reliance on police accounts of incidents involving a racially defined ‘problem group’ as evidence of the predispositions of this group within a wider narrative of worsening gang crime. The racialising premises established by police are retained even in subsequent coverage framed by the problematic of ‘integration’. Despite racism being identified and named in the course of reporting, it remains subsumed under the weight of frames which assume that the problem lies essentially with the ‘problem group’.     

Will to love,will to fear: the emotional politics of illegality and citizenship in the campaign against birthright citizenship in the US

Anti-immigration activists argue that the broad inclusivity of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment is a national security concern that enables criminalized migrant mothers to give birth to citizens who can later harm the US through violence and resource consumption. Seeing this argument as representative of the problem of inclusivity inherent to citizenship in a liberal democracy, this essay asks how the children of undocumented and temporary migrants are constructed as what Mae Ngai calls ‘alien citizens.’ Drawing from Sara Ahmed's affective economy of emotion, I find that affect and emotion figure prominently in how citizens are made ‘alien.’ Specifically love and fear function as pivot points in the anti-birthright citizenship argument, wherein the ‘real citizen’ is ‘willed’ to love and be loved by the nation and to fear the nation's Others. Moreover, the emphasis on national feelings does not evacuate white supremacy or heteronormativity from its imagination of citizenship, but instead displaces these loci of power into feeling and affect. Thus, this essay claims that the birthright citizenship argument illustrates how national love and fear work in tandem to uphold, naturalize, and expand the racial and sexual exclusions inherent to citizenship in a nation-state.     

Performing colonial sovereignty and the Israeli ‘separation’ wall

As a structure that does not mark an actual border and is constructed primarily on occupied territory, the Israeli ‘separation’ wall is a unique space that functions as both border and borderlands. Here, I explore the wall as a performance of sovereignty which simultaneously constructs and de-constructs imaginings of the Israeli nation-state. On the one hand, I contend that the wall is a colonial production that draws a psychic line between a ‘civilised in here’ and ‘uncivilised out there’, fulfilling the double function of forging a perceived bounded, protective national enclosure at the same time as buttressing the necessity of controlling territory beyond the bounds of that enclosure. On the other hand, I argue that the complex relationship between settler and state materialised in the wall points to a blending of theology and politics in Israel, which threatens to empower a God-sanctioned politics that undermines state. In addition to promoting anxiety of the Palestinian ‘out there’, then, the wall is understood as also fostering an anxiety increasingly turned inward to the structures of the Israeli state itself.     

Immigration,anti-racism,and Indigenous self-determination: towards a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary settler colonial

ABSTRACT

Anti-racist attempts to conceptualize Indigenous decolonial justice are preoccupied with the contested relationship between immigrant settlement and Indigenous self-determination. In the process, an ethically and politically driven practice of implicating immigrants onto the settler colonial project has emerged. Paying particular attention to the emerging concept of ‘immigrant settlerhood’ as a sign of severing of political economic considerations from theories of settler nationalism, I advocate for a comprehensive and concrete analysis that does not lose sight of the capitalist colonial project of simultaneous dispossession (of Indigenous people) and precarious incorporation/resettlement (of immigrants). Next, since notions of sovereignty primarily enact the conditions for exploitation of immigrants and impale them onto the settler project via anti-racist claims, I propose ‘no border’ politics as a conceptual tool for confronting settler colonialism. Finally, considering the centrality of land/place in Indigenous self-determination, I reflect on the possibility of a ground between Indigenous rootedness and diasporic placelessness. This essay thus makes an attempt to conceptualize an anti-racist politics that could meaningfully respond to the settler-colonial project of simultaneous recruitment/resettlement (of immigrants) and dispossession (of Indigenous people) without casting social justice demands of Indigenous peoples and immigrants as inherently oppositional.     

Native subjects on display: reviving the colonial exposition in Marcos' Philippines

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, 1100 Filipino ‘natives’ were used as human displays to argue for the colonial enterprise in the Philippines. Seventy years later, the Marcos regime staged Kasaysayan ng Lahi (History of the Race), a mass ceremony that reworked the visual, performative and commercial dynamics of the 1904 colonial exposition to promote heritage tourism in the Philippines. While the use of human displays in colonial expositions has been well documented and analyzed as a constitutive element of a Eurocentric ‘exhibitionary complex’, its uptake in developing nations seeking entry into an emergent cultural economy has yet to be explored. This article places critical analyses of colonial expositions, human displays and heritage tourism in productive dialogue, and examines the continuities and discontinuities between the Philippine exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the 1974 staging of Kasaysayan ng Lahi by the Marcos regime. Against established views of ‘staged authenticities’ as either exploitative or socially empowering, this case study advances a more complex framework for critical histories of the exhibitionary complex, and foregrounds the internal contradictions that inhere within the staging of indigenous heritage for purposes of cultural revitalization and economic development.     

Decolonising Eurocentric disability studies: why colonialism matters in the disability and global South debate

The words ‘colonised’ and ‘colonising’ have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other ‘decolonisation’ is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and lived – neocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.     

Negotiating postcolonial Eurasian identities and national belonging in global-city Singapore

ABSTRACT

A racial classification regime, partly derived from colonial race categories that solidified during the British Empire, remains a key governance strategy in postcolonial Singapore, sorting citizens into the categories of Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (CMIO). This racial grid continues to be a simplification of the actual complexity of lived identities and experiences, particularly for people of mixed descent. In this context, we explore the contemporary meanings and resonances of racial identity and national belonging as negotiated among members of a historic mixed-descent community – the Eurasians – in the context of a nation-state built on an institutionally fixed racial template. As a community, Eurasians are commonly attributed to the presence and mixing of especially Dutch, Portuguese and British – but also other Europeans – with an equally variegated palette of Asian cultures, since the 16th century. Based on 30 biographical interviews with self- identified Eurasians of two generations, this paper examines how individual and collective narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to the emergence of potentially new hierarchies of racial belonging with the arrival of new migration and the rise of international marriage in globalizing times. Given the lived reality of an expanding range of ‘race’ identities of different permutations and combinations, the politics of choice is played out between countervailing forces which draw racialized boundaries around the community more tightly on the one hand, and liberalize claims to racial and national belonging on the basis of self-identification on the other.     

Museums and the Utility of Culture: The Politics of Liberal Democracy and Cultural Well-Being

Contemporary museums exist as variously configured sets of institutional coordinates that aspire to function as popular, demotic spaces dedicated to representing a variety of experiences and modes of citizenship. In some cases, they can be seen as gesturing toward Yúdice's formulation, whereby recognizing the value of culture as a resource may facilitate or enable a new episteme that is ‘posthegemonic’ (from the ‘purview of the national proscenium’) and predicated on the withdrawal of the state from the public sphere (which also redefines the parameters of social agency). This post-Habermasian take on publicity has real implications for museums, which are, by and large, still functioning within what is, according to Yúdice, an exhausted model of citizenship.

This paper examines whether, in aiming to provide a much-publicized social advocacy role for indigenous peoples and source communities, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa might be seen as producing open and inclusive public spaces that encourage debate about what constitutes citizenship in postcolonial multicultural societies. I argue that a neo-Habermasian realm of association and interaction may be provided by cultural centre-like museums. However, I qualify this point by adding that this suitability also reveals the double-edged role of culture at the NMAI and Te Papa—where it is unclear whether culture provides a key resource for the state's social management discourses, or whether it is connected to discourses of development produced by—or in consultation with—communities.     

The Power of Ethnic Nationalism: Foucault's Bio-power and the Development of Ethnic Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Although the ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ brands of nationalism are frequently contrasted, the origins of the civic/ethnic dichotomy remain under-theorised. By building upon Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, this article argues that, during the eighteenth century, the articulation of power shifted across the board from a pre-modern control over the ending of life, to a modern expression of power as control over the production of life (dubbed ‘bio-power’ by Foucault). Given the Foucauldian claim that power is built upwards from ‘its most infinitesimal mechanisms’, it is suggested that expressions of bio-power were first enacted in that social structure most amenable to biological manipulation—the family—and then expanded upwards towards the widest understanding of a kin collective—the ethnic group. As the shift to bio-power took hold, so too did visions of the political nation-state begin to take shape in Eastern Europe. A fusion of doctrines of self-determinism with the expression of power as ‘control over the production of life’, then saw the ethnic nation-state gain credence as a social and political construct in Central and Eastern Europe. This article takes Romania as a case study through which the mechanisms of this exploratory argument can be illustrated.     

The Feminist “Quarantine” on Hijab: A Study of Its Two Mutually Exclusive Sets of Meanings

The discourse on feminism is sharply polarized between those who regard hijab as essentially debilitating and those who see it as an enabling tool for dignity, self-worth and freedom. This article will discuss both the negative and positive associations of hijab and point out ways it is used by Muslim women for liberatory ends. It will go against the grain of a common argument that hijab equates seclusion and constraints on women’s participation in public life hence it is inherently oppressive. I will argue that hijab can potentially be used for diametrically opposite purposes. While acknowledging the fact that the Islamic dress code for women can be misused by patriarchal power systems as well as by women themselves, I will put forth arguments against dismissive and uncritical criticism of hijab.     

Whitewashing the nation: racist jokes and the construction of the African ‘other’ in Greek popular cinema

This article explores representations of race in three Greek popular films of the 1970s and 1980s. The portrayal of African characters in these films is antagonistically positioned in relation to the dominant, ‘whitewashed’ Greek national narrative which relies on the nineteenth century idea that Greece is the progenitor of European civilization. Often masquerading itself as ‘just a joke’, the discourse of these films narrates the African Other as lacking in terms of culture, intelligence and beauty – the three central categories upon which the idea of the ‘white supremacy’, according to Cornell West, is historically constructed in modernity. Tightly woven with this idea (largely introduced in Greece by the leading European powers), these films enunciate explicitly colonial viewpoints in a country that was neither a colonial power nor at the geopolitical center of the European project. The article argues that the racialized representations of these films are an effect of appropriating the Eurocentric idea of historicism, where the ‘progress’ and ‘backwardness’ of groups and nations are measured according to how effectively they perform the values of modernity.     

WHO's MIND,whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics

This paper examines the Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development of the World Health Organization (WHO), or what it refers to as its MIND project, as it produces versions of human and human suffering. Arising at approximately the same time as decolonization began to occur, the WHO can be read as reflective of colonial history as well as a colonizing force in postcolonial times. Through an analysis of the WHO's publicly available material, we shall show how the MIND project is not only a product of, but also helps to produce the power of coloniality. In the WHO MIND project, professional disability knowledge is used to identify an emergent mental health crisis in need of Western medical intervention. Guided by Fanon's call to notice how assistance makes a subject ‘thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type,’ we examine the role of disability knowledge in the production of people ‘fit’ to survive in environments that reproduce coloniality. We show how the WHO MIND project can be read so as to reveal the restrictive and exclusive versions of the human that have arisen from the colonial past as our way to attempt to disrupt the developmental trajectory of the coloniality of the present.     

Learning through laughing: an ‘African-American’ singer with ‘Japanese soul’ and the possibility of a new subjectivity in Japan

In this article, we argue that laughter can be a catalyst in learning about a new subjectivity – simultaneously African-American and Japanese – by analyzing an audience’s initial reaction to Jero, a young ‘African-American’ singer wearing hip hop attire who sings enka, a genre of music that is considered the ‘heart and soul of Japan’. Using television clips uploaded to YouTube and the viewers’ comments left on the sites as data, we analyze the audience’s laughter and amazement, followed by the question, ‘Why?’ and explanation of his background. Drawing on Hervé Varenne’s argument that learning occurs when we acknowledge our ignorance and seek to change it, we argue that the laughter marks their ignorance of such subjectivity, followed by learning as to why such subjectivity is possible. Challenging hegemonic behavior in daily life is often considered ‘bad sport’ and thus difficult. While involving complex relations of power of consumer-performer relations and authenticator-authenticated relations as well as a problematic race-talent link, we suggest that learning-through-laughing may be a new field worth exploring as an effective strategy for social change.