The destruction of heritage: rock art in the Burrup Peninsula

The destruction of rock art in the Burrup Peninsula, performed by several mammoth industries strategically located in the Peninsula since the 1960s, allows me to analyse the concept of heritage within a global history of art and find meaning in the difficult task of interpreting rock art. The Burrup Peninsula not only hosts the largest rock art site in the world, but also one of the largest deposits of natural gas, iron ore and salt. As a consequence, the land (sacred to the Indigenous people), becomes extremely important in order to sustain the booming economy of Australia. In this difficult negotiation between heritage and progress the rock art is embedded with new meanings and the heritage becomes ephemeral. Failing to include the site in the World Heritage Site list created by UNESCO, the roles of identity and memory are contested by the two groups represented on each side of the debate: on one hand, the Aboriginal Traditional owners and the archaeologists; on the other, the Australian government and the cultural establishment that denies the rock art an aesthetic significance by considering it “primitive” and “archaic”. The debate becomes even more pertinent after realizing that the Australian government has flagged other buildings and natural parks as World Heritage Sites, while the rock art in the Burrup Peninsula is catalogued as national, but not World, Heritage. As a result, the concept of heritage can be defined on several levels: local, regional, national and international.

How many times can the same image change? The history of the image in Murujuga

In this paper, I will analyze the history of the image in Murujuga, located in Western Australia, through three stages: creation, preservation and destruction. I will argue that each stage is linked to a turning point in the history of Australia. The first stage is linked to the Dreamtime, a time where Aboriginal cosmology sets the origin of the world. The second stage is linked to the arrival of the white settlers and colonialist practices, where surprisingly the images were neither appropriated nor destroyed, but neglected. The third stage is linked to destruction, where the Aboriginal images from Murujuga does not find a place, and instead are excluded from the multicultural frame of heritage, that Australia boasts. The conclusion will give me the opportunity to discuss how these changes have affected the meaning and perception of these specific images (Aboriginal rock art), by contesting the concept of heritage.

Collective cultural rights in Asia: recognition and enforcement

This paper focuses particularly on how the notion of collective cultural rights is understood in Asia and how such rights are recognized in law and enforced through governmental policy. The discussion links the notions of cultural rights and cultural heritage, drawing inspiration from Comment No. 21 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2009) which asserts that everyone has the right to take part in cultural life and that “the obligations to respect and to protect freedoms, cultural heritage and cultural diversity are interconnected.” Efforts to protect and enhance human rights can only take place within states, and the record in Asian countries is very mixed. First and second generation human rights, with their emphasis on the individual, are sometimes regarded as Western in origin and character, while third generation collective cultural rights have been closely associated with Indigenous peoples, commonly living as minorities within European settler societies in the New World. Unlike Europe, Africa and the Americas, Asia does not have a regional intergovernmental human rights charter. Using case studies of China, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam the paper seeks to show why there is no Asian charter and asks what would it look like if there was one.

Theorising irony and trauma in magical realism: Junot Díaz’s the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s the swan book

Magical realism has been commonly theorized in terms of a postcolonial strategy of cultural renewal, according to which such fiction is understood as embodying a racialized epistemology allegedly inclusive of magic. The inherent exoticism of this idea has drawn criticism. Critics have recently begun to re-envision magical realism in terms of trauma theory. However, trauma readings of magical realism tend to unselfconsciously reinvigorate an authenticating rhetoric: magical realism is represented not as the organic expression of a precolonial or hybrid consciousness, but of colonial or other kinds of trauma. Through case studies of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, this essay intervenes in trauma studies readings of magical realist literature to emphasize the fundamentally ironic nature of the iconic narrative strategy of representing the ostentatiously fantastical as real. It also argues that these texts, while invested in representing the traumas of colonialism, are less interested in authenticating magic as part of a postcolonial or traumatic epistemology than in transforming fantasy into history and empowered futurity.

Exploring cultures of belonging in Darwin, Australia

This paper argues that the use of visual methods such as participatory video is crucial to co-producing sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in Australian cities. These knowledges of belonging that focus on affectivity and passion have the potential to expand the worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit, but contemporary urban research shows an overwhelming focus on ‘talk’. This paper therefore takes the risk by engaging in a research process that is experimental, flexible and adaptive to explore diverse sensory cultures of belonging through a focus on Darwin, a small north Australian city. This is a city with a polyethnic history where Indigenous-migrant-settler race relations are recognised as more complex in comparison to large south Australian cities. The paper draws on participatory videos of two eventsin suburban Darwin - a Vigil on the side of the road opposite Airport
Lodge, an asylum seeker detention centre, and an afternoon walk along Casuarina beach where Aboriginals who live ‘rough’ camp. Using short video clips, long-term residents, migrant newcomers and asylum seekers (on bridging visas) compose an expressive narrative of the road and beach in Darwin, as places where refrains of welcome expand worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit. Using digital technologies the flow and juxtaposition of video clips of these events provides the possibility to craft sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in a north
Australian city with a history of assimilationist and racially discriminatory policies.

Staircases, pyramids and poisons: the immunitary paradigm in the works of Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton

The recent focus on the category of culture provoked by Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering (2009) has revived questions of the meaning and utility of indigenous alterity in Australia. The end of the liberal consensus, contemporary with a declared end of ideology in Australian Indigenous† public policy, has been doubled in post-ethnic academic work harbouring a renewed suspicion of what Dombrowski (2010, 21: 129-140) has called indigeneity's distinctive sympathy. Within a cultural economy of commensurability, the fact that political claims are often contingent on the indigenous people themselves maintaining sufficient alterity to warrant the special treatment afforded them is taken by some as proof of voluntarism and bad faith. In order to gauge this immanent reorientation of indigeneity in Australia, this paper surveys the works of two prominent figures in policy debates-the anthropologist Peter Sutton and indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson-who have both argued that remote Indigenous communities suffer from a cultural pathology. This paper presents a conceptual critique of their popular press works between 2000 and 2011. Within the context of post-ethnic government policy after self-determination and scholarship after identity, this paper contends that we are witnessing the (re)appearance of an equalitarian humanism which proposes, following Esposito [2008 (Orig. pub. 2004)], to immunize indigenous polities and the settler-colonial state against the historical frames and alterity of indigeneity.

Duplicity of meaning

This article considers the ‘duplicitous’ functions of the word ‘wild’ in the arguments over the Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act 2005. Certain traditional owners, environmentalist and state groups have deployed the term pragmatically, simultaneously endorsing its usage (through repetition) and disavowing its colonial associations (through explanation) against protestations by Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders. In a sense, this ambivalent ‘duplicity’ is entirely consistent with relations between the settler-colonial nation state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander polities – relations aptly characterised by Povinelli as shaped by ‘the cunning of recognition’ – which stratify relations between groups through the endorsing of ‘tradition’. Thus ‘the Indigenous’ can be posited both as one political minority amidst a multicultural polity and as a pre-modern and endemic precursor of the settler-colonial nation, constitutively conservationist ‘first Australians’. Arguably, in the legislation’s ‘recognition’ of the ‘wild’ past, Indigenous peoples – who were known in nineteenth century Queensland as ‘wild blacks’ or ‘myalls’ (meaning those who resisted leaving their lands – and ‘could be shot with impunity’) are recouped as the nation’s first caretakers of ‘pristine’ waterways. However, this article regards the current use of this ambivalent word as also potentially authorising those recognised through this mythic form, providing a limited and uncertain opportunity for traditional owners to ground a form of sovereign right in lands and waterways. Against totalising settler-colonial critiques of hegemony, this article argues that the Wild Rivers legislation does not forget indigeneity, but rather relies on indigeneity. While much research concerning ‘natural’ ideologies such as ‘the noble savage’ has worked to show that faith in a belated era of historical fullness or presence can serve to evacuate the present of material details, it may also be that the ‘wild’ can also offer Indigenous peoples a valuable political authority to, in the words of Courtney Jung, ‘contest the exclusions through which it has been constituted’.

First law and the force of water: law, water, entitlement

In this essay, the authors respond to several of the papers included in this special issue. First reflecting on the relation between waters, ‘First law’,1 and settler law, the authors then draw connections between some of the contributions to the issue. Water, the authors contend, is a productive site for thinking through the organs and processes of settler law, though such attention, they argue, also reveals how the ‘constitutional’ question of waters is occluded by the presence and dominance of settler law. The final section turns to Aotearoa/New Zealand as a negative example of this situation, one in which the constituting force of waters is nullified by the incorporation of indigenous politics within the processes and institutions of the settler legal order.

Pedagogical Appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by West African Educators = Appropriation pédagogique des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) par les éducateurs ouest-africains

Œuvre dédiée à Alioune Camara; merci au Prof. Denis Dougnon de l’Université de Bamako pour le parrainage

The Ultimate Secrecy: Feminist Readings of Masculine Trauma in Vietnam War Literature

It is a widely acknowledged and often unquestioned fact that patriarchy and its modes of behaviour and social organization favour the appearance of trauma on the weakest (and defenceless) members of society: women. In the last decades, trauma seems to have taken the baton of typically female maladies such as 19th c. hysteria or 20th c. madness. Feminists in the 20th c. have long worked to prove the connection between the latter affections (and their reflection in literary texts) and patriarchal oppression or expectations of feminine behaviour and accordance to roles and rules. With Trauma Studies on the rise, the approach to the idea of the untold as related to femininity is manifold: on the one hand, is not trauma, which precludes telling about one’s own experience and keeps it locked not only from the others, but also from ourselves, the ultimate secrecy? On the other hand, when analyzing works that reflect trauma, one is astounded by the high number of them with a female protagonist and an almost all-female cast: in this sense, a ‘feminist’ reading is almost compulsory, in the sense that it is usually the author’s assumption that patriarchal systems of exploitation and expectations favour traumatic events and their outcome (silence and secrets) on the powerless, usually women. Often, traumatic texts combine feminism with other analytical discourses (one of the topics proposed for this panel): Toni Morrison’s study of traumatic responses in The Bluest Eye and Beloved cannot be untangled from her critique of slavery; just as much of Chicana feminism and its representations of rape and abuse (two main agents of trauma) analyze the nexus of patriarchy, new forms of post-colonialism, and the dynamics of power and powerlessness in ethnic contexts. Within this tradition that establishes the secrecies of trauma as an almost exclusively feminine characteristic, one is however faced with texts which have traumatized males as protagonists: curiously enough, most of these characters have suffered trauma through a typically masculine experience: that of war and its aftermath. By analyzing novels dealing with war veterans from Vietnam or the Second World War, the astounding findings are the frequent mixture of masculine or even ‘macho’ values and the denial of any kind of ‘feminine’ characteristics, combined with a very strict set of rules of power and hierarchy that clearly establish who is empowered and who is powerless. It is our argument that this replication of patriarchal modes of domination, which place the lowest ranks of the army in a ‘feminine’ situation, blended with the compulsory ‘macho’ stance soldiers are forced to adopt as army men (as seen, for example, in Philip Caputo’s Indian Country, Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story or Ed Dodge’s DAU: A Novel of Vietnam) furthers the onset and seriousness of ulterior trauma. In this sense, we can also analyze this kind of writing from a ‘feminist’ point of view, since the dynamics of über-patriarchal power established at the front at war-time deny any display of elements traditionally viewed as ‘feminine’ (such as grief, guilt or emotions) in soldiers. If trauma is the result of a game of patriarchal empowerment, how can feminist works, not only theoretical, but also fictional, overthrow it? Are ‘feminine’ characteristics necessary to escape trauma, even in male victims? How can feminist readings of trauma enhance our understanding of its dynamics and help produce new modes of interaction that transcend power and gender division as the basis for the organization of society?

Defending the 'public interest': an assessment of competing actor representations of 'solutions' to growing natural resource deficiencies.

This paper applies a SRT framework to the study of two case studies, namely the recent campaign of opposition to the legalization of hydraulic fracking in the State of New York and the more ongoing debate on land leasing in Africa. In relation to both campaigns, the analysis accounts for the arguments of a major financial institution and industry representatives who stress the safe and value-adding dimensions of these practices, as well as the views of opponents who refute the validity of industry's position and point to the unacceptable risks posed to the community, health and the environment. In spite of a number of obvious differences between these two case studies, not least differences arising from contrasting socio-economic and geo-political settings, there were also some notable similarities. First, was a tendency amongst protesters in both cases to formulate their role as contemporaries in a historically extended struggle for democratic justice. All perceived of themselves as guardians of their community's right to resist a corporate 'invasion' of their territories, like their forefathers and mothers before them. A theme of colonialism was explored in both settings through various identity and thematic anchoring devices that deliberately evoked shared understandings and historical memories of exploitation and human suffering. The evocation of powerful symbols of identity through visual narratives of protest further reinforced the cultural comprehensibility of opponents' message of protest in both contexts.

Ana's tragedy - and Europe's a contemplation over Romani, belonging and citizenship making in a Europe of migration

This article deals with the notion of belonging in today’s multi-ethnic Sweden and hints at perpectives of future European identity-building. On the basis of Frantz Fanon’s understanding of colonialism and the colonized mentality as theoretical, the article deals with the situation of Roma in Sweden – and Europe. With the story of a young Roma woman that has migrated to Sweden from Hungary as point of departure, the article addresses the situation for Romani people, but also for other migrants in Europe, with particular focus on who are allowed to belong to the community of Swedish and European citizens, and who are not

Book review: Edward M Curr and the tide of history

As much scholarship has shown over the past decades, settler attitudes to Indigenous peoples thrived on difference and righteousness — the latter not in a religious sense (necessarily) but in an absolute conviction, one sunk deep into the settler heart, of the moral and material just-ness of their usurpation of Indigenous country. This conviction sanctioned settler violence and outlawed Indigenous resistance. Difference not only denied the humanity in the Indigenous face; it made the people objects of curiosity, to be quickly described, analysed and catalogued for science before they ‘disappeared’ as naturally as one season disappears into another.

Other people's country : law, water, entitlement

This issue of Settler Colonial Studies comes out of a long-term collaboration between the guest editors which began, in earnest, with a panel on the theme of ‘Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement’ at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference held at the University of Sydney in December 2012. The panel’s topic was drawn from our own work on encounters between settler and indigenous ‘laws’ over specific waters, including Lake Omapere in the Hokianga district of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada, Lake Cayuga in upper New York State, and the Wenlock, Archer, Stewart and Lockhart rivers in far north Queensland, Australia.1 Further, the conference’s provocative title (Materialities: Economies, Empiricism, & Things) corresponded to our own interest in thinking through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within these settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, we were interested in attempting to locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of a ‘real world’.