‘Witnessing the Violence of the Settler State in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song’

A Canadian literary scholar based in Australia, I read “Aboriginal/Indigenous” Australian and Canadian literatures in English as sites where the ways in which we perceive racial and cultural violence might be re-configured. Cognizant of the role that literary studies discourse has had and continues to have in these nations as a tool for the maintenance of official, state-recognised ‘reconciliation’ narratives, my work looks instead to the literary encounter itself as a potential site for registering, or witnessing, the violence that the settler state attempts to screen off behind the scenes of its official attitudes towards reconciliation. This article will explore the concept of literary witnessing in an archive of trans-Indigenous literature across settler colonial states, linking award-winning authors Alexis Wright (Waanyi, writing in Australia) and Lee Maracle (Sto:lo, writing in Canada). Analysing Wright’s Carpentaria and Maracle’s Celia’s Song, I trace how these novels enact and inspire, but also complicate, witnessing in Canada and Australia (both of which maintain official policies of inclusion and multiculturalism, but are actually held up by a regime of continuing racialized violence). I also examine how these works of literature model ignorance and choosing to turn away as a form of violence and a roadblock to justice. Finally, I ask how these novels might provide models for subjectivity and justice that subvert the judiciary systems of these settler states, dislodging ‘witnessing’ from its place in discourses of state-authorized “justice”, and placing it in the realm of Indigenous law and the potential of an ethical (literary) encounter.

Ruins, rhizomes, palimpsests, and traces-mémoires: Guadeloupe’s Mémorial ACTe and the art(s) of representation

This study examines the degree to which the world’s largest slavery memorial and arts center enacts emerging theorizations of postcolonial memory to connect the Caribbean’s colonial history to legacies of human exploitation both transnationally and transtemporally. Situated literally on top of the former Darboussier sugar factory site, the Mémorial ACTe is a lieu de mémoire that invites a palimpsestic approach to its symbolic location, architecture, and museography. Through a consideration of contemporary art, first in the ephemeral occupation by artists of the Darboussier ruins pre-demolition and then in the MACTe’s permanent and temporary exhibitions, we argue that artists are not only uniquely positioned to preserve the memory traces of lesser-known histories, but that their work is particularly adept at articulating interconnections between various moments of racialized violence.

Protest Structures: Responses From Nigerians in the United States to Police Brutality and #BlackLivesMatter Protests

This study examined how Nigerian immigrants communicated about, and got involved in, #BlackLivesMatter protests and/or advocacy due to racialized violence against Blacks in the United States during the summer of 2020. Using a qualitative open-ended questionnaire, a purposive sample of Nigerians ( N = 70) was assembled. Constant comparative analysis revealed that communication about and participation in the BLM movement consisted of affective (feelings associated with protests), cognitive (psychological processes triggered by thinking about protests), and behavioral (actions and engagement in protests) responses. This process is labeled protest structures, a term that captures the socio-psychological processes that shape the communication of and involvement in protests and/or advocacy. We discuss further how social positioning impacts active participation in the fight for racial equality and social change.

Historical redlining and contemporary racial disparities in neighborhood life expectancy

While evidence suggests a durable association between redlining and population health, we lack an empirical account of how this historical act of racialized violence produced contemporary inequities. In this paper, we use a mediation framework to evaluate how redlining grades influenced later life expectancy and the degree to which contemporary racialized disparities in life expectancy between Black working-class neighborhoods and white professional-class neighborhoods can be explained by past HOLC mapping. Life expectancy gaps between differently graded tracts are driven by urban renewal, economic isolation, and property valuation that developed within these areas in subsequent decades. Still, only a small fraction of the total disparity between contemporary Black and white neighborhoods is predicted by HOLC grades. We discuss the role of these maps in analyses of structural racism, positioning them as only one feature of the larger public-private project of conflating race with financial risk. Policy implications include targeting resources to formerly redlined neighborhoods, but also dismantling broader racist logics of capital accumulation codified in more abstracted political economies of place.

The Violence of Leadership in Black Lives Matter

Since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the United States has seen the coalescing of black protestors and activists along with their multiracial collaborators under the banner of Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This struggle against racialized violence, police brutality, and white supremacy has been witnessed in myriad ways, with two of its most prominent “reactions” occurring in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Within this struggle, the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) has chosen to follow a “leader-full” model that replaces traditional hierarchical forms of leadership for that of collaboration and decentralization. This chapter thus seeks to highlight the competing notions of centralized and decentralized leadership within black liberation movements to better understand this model. Using the works of Barbara Ransby, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Frantz Fanon, this work will explore forms of black leadership that articulate alternative modes of accountability, service, and well-being within the struggle for black livability.

A Collective Grievance, A Collective Acquiescence

Can grieving death be the presence of a haunting? In this brief think piece, I draw on memory studies to contemplate the ongoing pandemic of racialized violence against Black and Indigenous people specifically and people of colour more generally. Life and death, surviving and suffering, and tenebrous apparitions are discussed as I synthesize the work of Sharpe (2016), Dean (2015), and Gordon (2008) to consider how we, particularly white scholars like myself, are implicated in a present that is haunted by an insidiously active past. Vision and the nuances of sight are also discussed in relation to whiteness, accountability, and allyship with/in our seemingly over-and-done-with pandemic of anti-Black and settler-colonial violence.

Martial politics, MOVE and the racial violence of policing

Recent scholarship on war and policing has begun to theorize the two in more intimate relation with each other, especially through connections to racialized violence and governance. Drawing on this body of work, and the concept of martial politics specifically, I examine how logics of war operate within domestic spaces and reproduce racialized conceptualizations of threat. I focus on a confrontation between the MOVE organization and the city of Philadelphia in 1985, which led to police firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition into a house where MOVE members and their children were living, and to the extensive use of military-grade explosives, culminating in the police dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto the house. The bomb ignited a fire that killed six adult MOVE members and five children, and destroyed 61 houses. I examine the decision of the city to bomb MOVE and consider the role that conceptions of war and threat played in shaping the event. This case shows not just the migration of military techniques into domestic spheres (and a long history of this in the United States), but more significantly, it reveals how violence and war-making have always been a foundation of liberal governance.

Re-Membering Catholicity: Higher Education, Racial Justice, and the Spirituality of the Posthuman University

In the reinscribing of white supremacy in the United States, the contemporary university as a place of exclusion presents a problem of religion. Approaching religion as “the search for depth” and addressing the “techno-myths” of betterment, longevity, and the rituals of enacting these myths that capture today’s social imaginaries, this paper proposes an alternative to religious faith in “rising” and the rhetoric of the contemporary American technocratic-meritrocratic paradigm. Adopting the posthumanist methodologies of reflexivity and diffraction, the author argues for an embodied catholicity of the university as a community, an open system rather than a pre-formed locus to which racially minoritized students are “added” or “included”. In advancing the co-creativity of a Catholic-pluriversal university via an ethic of love and care, the author presents a Christian spirituality that is itself a technology that offers the hope of enacting a more life-giving congruence between the sacred and the secular than the myth of Manifest Destiny and the racialized violence that is the continued manifestation of that mythos. Embodied in the posthuman mystic’s practices of “re-memory,” the author presents Christianity as a performative-pluralistic religion of evolution, one of common action with the potential to draw into something new the energies of creativity in today’s university.