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 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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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.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBeginning anew: Exceptional institutions and the politics of ritual(Routledge, 2017)This chapter makes a case for treating exceptional institutions as sui generis. It takes a critical look at exceptional institutions as 'transformative rituals' and reflects on how far the analogy between transition and revolution can to be pressed. Though the codification of the Nuremberg principles into international law has done a great deal to legitimate it retrospectively, the mist of arbitrariness surrounding the international criminal tribunal as an institution has never quite lifted and continues to plague subsequent iterations in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Looked at from a political perspective, this appropriation of the revolutionary notion of the 'new beginning' for transitional settings has an inherently ambiguous quality. The chapter argues that the injustices of the past live on after the 'transformative event' and require political communities to sustain a 'work of memory' – a work, that is, of continually sifting through the past and digesting its significance with respect to keeping faith with the promise of 'never again'.
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ItemThe Power of Forgetting: Ressentiment, Guilt, and Transformative Politics(Wiley, 2017-08)Though long regarded as an injustice in its own right, willed forgetting is currently enjoying something of a revival in politics. Concerned by the threat memory poses to both the peace and vitality of the state, critics have championed forgetting for its power to release us from ressentiment and begin anew. In this article, I take a closer look at Nietzsche's conception of willed forgetfulness, specifically as it is set out in On the Genealogy of Morals, to bring out what contemporary critics of the “surfeit of memory” seem happy to ignore: Namely, that a certain kind of cruelty, either against others or towards oneself, is the sine qua non of forgetting. Drawing on Freud as a supplement, I argue that many of the symptoms critics ascribe to the surfeit of memory—the culture of victimhood, the tyranny of guilt, the displacement of action, and the eclipse of visionary modes of imagining the future—may in actual fact be the product of forgetting.
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ItemWhose Paradise? Encounter, Exchange, and Exploitation(UNIV HAWAII PRESS, 2018)This essay is a critical reexamination of the trope of paradise. This trope has a long global history encompassing colonial imaginings and missionary and travel narratives, and notions of “paradise” continue to influence contemporary narratives of place and landscape in the Pacific for Indigenous groups and others. While much has been written about the potency of the paradise trope in the West, it is often implicitly assumed that Indigenous engagement with the trope amounts to a simple rejection or dismissal of “paradise.” In contrast, we suggest that the dynamics of possession, dispossession, and repossession of paradise require further investigation. Paradise is both an imaginary that frames foreign engagement with the Pacific and a complex political landscape that is mobilized by Indigenous people both to contest neocolonial forms of appropriation and exploitation and to affirm local articulations of ownership and belonging in the Pacific.