Arts Collected Works - Research Publications
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ItemThe Failure of 'Recognition'(Arena Printing and Publishing, 2016)A successful referendum on the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may once have looked like a fairly good prospect. The failure of the founders to make any mention of Aboriginal people in the Constitution seemed self-evidently in need of correction, the proposal enjoyed bipartisan support in a parliament that could agree on little else, and, in the person of Tony Abbott, it found a prime minister who said he was willing to ‘sweat blood’ for it. Such, it seems, was the confidence (or was it in fact the desperation?) of the political establishment that it blithely commenced its ‘yes’ campaign, ‘Recognise’, before the substance of the proposal had even been decided. And yet the chances that we will even have settled on a question before 27 May 2017 rolls around—this being the date originally favoured by Abbott—now seem increasingly slim. For all the goodwill built up (and all the public-relations exercises undertaken) during the six years since Prime Minister Julia Gillard first returned it to the political agenda, recognition would appear to be on the brink of failing. What happened?
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ItemNo Preview Available[Review of the book] Antigone, Interrupted, by Bonnie Honig(Imprint Academic, 2016)
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ItemNo Preview Available[Review of the book] Public trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the politics of lost causes, by Lida Maxwell(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017-11)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSpeaking with Two Voices: 'We, the People(s) of Australia'?(Routledge, 2024)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAfter Apology: The Remains of the Past(Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2017-05)In an extraordinarily prescient lecture, addressed to the nation responsible for the first ‘crime against humanity’, Theodor Adorno attested to the paradox of a past that lives on, but cannot be lived with: ‘one wants to get free of the past, rightly so, since one cannot live in its shadow, and since there is no end to terror if guilt and violence are only repaid, again and again, with guilt and violence. But wrongly so, since the past one wishes to evade is still so intensely alive’ (Adorno 115). Although ‘the past’ to which Adorno refers remains the exceptional instance of state crime, his observations strike at the heart of a dilemma that many political communities continue to grapple with today: how does one get free of a past that refuses to pass? Though an increasingly popular theme of intellectual inquiry, a burgeoning topic within the ever expanding and ever more sophisticated field of ‘memory studies’, the question could scarcely be dismissed as being of merely academic interest. Assuming John Torpey is even half right in suggesting that concern for the future has now been eclipsed by a ‘preoccupation with past crimes and atrocities’, the ‘righting old wrongs’ project is of more than marginal concern for states right around the world (Torpey 1). Indeed, if the problem of ‘coming to terms with the past’ was ever exclusively German, it is now a truly universal political concern.
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ItemPast Injustices and Future Protections: On the Politics of Promising(Indigenous Law Centre University of New South Wales, 2009)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBetween Speech and Silence: The Postcolonial Critic and the Idea of Emancipation(Taylor and Francis Group, 2001-02-17)The concept of emancipation has an increasingly ambivalent status in postcolonial criticism. Under the influence of poststructuralism, the idea that the subaltern subject might overcome colonial relations of cultural domination through acts of self-representation has been thrown into disrepute. If there is to be emancipation, according to this view, it will not come through the recovery of an authentic speaking subject, but through strategies of ‘strategic essentialism’. Here it is argued that this postructuralist approach leaves the subaltern in a politically pre carious position and should be exchanged for the kind of hermeneutic approach that makes possible a genuine politics of recognition.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Penitent State: Exposure, Mourning and the Biopolitics of National Healing(Oxford University Press, 2023-09-21)This book asks a deceptively simple question: what are states actually doing when they do penance for past injustices? Why are these penitential gestures - especially the gesture of apology - becoming so ubiquitous and what implications do they carry for the way power is exercised? Drawing on the work of Schmitt, Foucault and Agamben, the book argues that there is more at stake in sovereign acts of repentance and redress than either the recognition of the victims or the legitimacy of the state. Driven, it suggests, by an interest in 'healing', such acts testify to a new biopolitical raison d'état in which the management of trauma emerges as a critical expression of attempts to regulate the life of the population. The Penitent State seeks to show that the key issue created by the 'age of apology' is not whether sovereign acts of repentance and redress are sincere or insincere, but whether the political measures licensed in the name of healing deserve to be regarded as either restorative or just.
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ItemA reconciliation most desirable: Shame, narcissism, justice and apology(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2017-03)This paper seeks to draw attention to the narcissistic dimensions of the reconciliation movement in Australia and, more specifically, to the way in which the desire to ‘make innocent’ compromises the attempt to ‘make amends’ and construct a just polity. Building upon some early work by Anthony Moran (1998) and Elizabeth Povinelli (1998), it sets out to defend two claims: firstly, that the intensity of the desire for reconciliation in Australia (and conceivably in other settler colonial states as well) is attributable to the sense of shame arising from the collapse of the national ego ideal; and secondly, that the real target of the reparative efforts undertaken under the auspices of reconciliation is the healing of the ‘narcissistic injury’ inflicted by the failure of the assimilation project and the assertion of Aboriginal separateness.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableContesting Australian Asylum Policy: Political Alienation, Socratic Citizenship, and Cosmopolitan Critique(WILEY, 2017-06)In the face of the hard‐line approach to asylum‐seekers currently being taken by both the major political parties in Australia, alienated cosmopolitans have been increasingly inclined to disidentify with the Australian nation and declare “not in my name”. Although sympathetic both to the cosmopolitan position and to these acts of principled dissent, I express reservations about such an approach on the grounds that it distances the cosmopolitan elite from the democratic mass and inclines towards irresponsibility. Drawing on Socrates as an exemplar, I investigate how citizens with cosmopolitan sensibilities might resist injustice on universal moral grounds without being either condemned by or exiled from their local political community. Ultimately, I argue in favour of an embedded cosmopolitanism that engages critically with the political ethos and calls on citizens to take responsibility for protecting the state in its ideal image.