Deep Donkey and Dadirri: asking Creatura out to play

This article is based on the premise that we are currently awakening to the full systemic impact of the emerging global ecological crisis which is already having a devastating effect on the ecosystems of the earth and also a highly destructive impact on psychological well-being. The ecological crisis has coincided with the painful awakening to the social and environmental destruction that has resulted from the legacy of a colonial world view of nature and culture. These events now demand a radical and deep adaption of our view of nature and culture. It is becoming clear that we are facing not only an ecological break down and a narrative collapse, but also a breakdown in how to make sense of what we are facing. This article explores how systemic psychotherapy and Gregory Bateson’s work on the gnostic ideas of pleroma and creatura, can provide a framework to support the Decolonial Turn but also an EcoSystemic Return. This article uses the children’s game of Donkey and the Indigenous Australian practice of Dadirri to playfully explore how we might overcome Bateson’s notion of epistemological error when engaging with systemic practice, Indigenous nature practice and quantum physics. The article suggests an imaginary game of Deep Donkey to overcome the destructive legacy of Cartesian dualism at the core of western culture and to begin to open western imagination to an intra-subjective dialogue with nature. I suggest the game of Deep Donkey could a helpful practice in realigning western thinking with sophisticated and long subjugated Indigenous ecological and cultural wisdom.

The “Yellow Peril” and the Asia-Pacific War

This chapter explores the history of racialized threats and fears of Asia in the Western imagination. It shows that the discourse of the “yellow peril” can be understood as a process of world-making of “Asian” alterity through ideas of threat and insecurity; it is a discourse of anxiety wherein the global racial imaginary is seen as being in crisis and what potentially replaces it is a world of disorder and violence. The second section of the chapter then examines how both the Japanese and the Americans engaged in the racialization of each other: first, in terms of how the Japanese empire itself internalized its own version of racial order in response to the global racial imaginary; second, for the United States, as a way of intensifying the violence against a racial other, which can be traced back to the settler colonial plans of the nineteenth century. I conclude the chapter by showing how the global racial imaginary functioned within the United States during the early Cold War period by representing the Soviet Union as the Asiatic other.

Tragedy of Errors at Warp Speed: The 2019 Unrest

The 2019 unrest in Hong Kong was the result of complex factors simmering over the years, culminating in a tragedy of errors unreeling at warp speed. This paper examines a few of the factors from the personal perspective of a Hong Kong-born Chinese American. Since the 1997 Retrocession, Hong Kong had been engaged in a unique version of post-colonial condition, “one country, two systems” (OCTS), meaning that it must contend with not only ways of a new beginning and ways of the former days but also ways for a future beginning—that of future China when OCTS expires. Hong Kong had also been conditioned to look at itself through the Western gaze and its future through Western imagination, resulting in self-objectification. Many of its people were consumed by misguided idealism that compelled citizens toward a profound mistrust of China while turning a blind eye to the country’s unique accomplishment. A powerful media dedicated to promoting the Western agenda further fanned the fire, turning the former colony into an unwitting proxy of the new Cold War waged by the United States on China. Such was a tragedy of errors that a movement launched against a worrisome rule, resulting in the passing of a law even more worrisome.

PATRIARCHY AND THE “OTHER” IN THE WESTERN IMAGINATION: HONOUR KILLINGS AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

The purpose of this article is to explore the pedagogical challenges of teaching university-level, feminist, anti-racist courses that examine how Eurocentric patriarchal practices of male violence against women within Canadian society are normalized and obscured through the concept of honour killing. I argue that the normalization of Western structures and practices of patriarchy reproduces racism, sexism, and classism by focusing attention on the “Otherness” of non-Western forms of patriarchy. Honour killings are rendered as distinct from other forms of male violence against women on the basis that they are seen solely as a product of non-Western cultures and religions and not as part of a spectrum of forms of male violence against women practised by all patriarchal societies in Western and non-Western countries.

Pain of Privacy

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).

Appropriate Targets

With the International Whaling Commission’s 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling in force, much of today’s cetacean hunting is done by traditional or indigenous communities for subsistence use. However, many communities continue to face pressure from other global stakeholders to stop. Informed by my research with marine hunters in Indonesia, this article combines scholarship from biology, philosophy, and law with global anthropology on cetacean hunting groups to explore a set of recurring arguments arising between hunting communities, management and conservation bodies, and publics. These include the role of charismatic species in Western imagination and conservation; how understandings of animal sentience determine acceptable prey; disputes about the authenticity of and control over traditional hunting practice; and the entanglement of cultural sovereignty and rights to animal resources. Bringing these arguments together allows for an examination of how the dominant global discourse about traditional whaling is shaped and how it affects extant hunting communities.