Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism

Australia, Race and Place

Lisa Slater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429782879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This book analyses the anxiety "well-intentioned" settler Australian women experience when engaging with Indigenous politics. Drawing upon cultural theory and studies of affect and emotion, Slater argues that settler anxiety is an historical subjectivity which shapes perception and senses of belonging. Why does Indigenous political will continue to provoke and disturb? How does settler anxiety inform public opinion and "solutions" to Indigenous inequality? In its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of settler colonialism, emotions and ethical belonging, Anxieties of Belonging has far-reaching implications for understanding Indigenous-settler relations.

1 Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging

Have you felt it in yourself or sensed it circulate in a space? Good white people writhing with discomfort, and no shortage of disdain and affront in the face of Indigenous political will. I’ll use an academic conference as an example. So as not to identify any particular scholar, below I sketch a scene drawn from several presentations, where the largely white, academic audience are called to account. A prominent Indigenous academic is delivering a keynote to an informed, receptive audience. We want to hear her well-researched arguments, and perhaps more so, learn from her, gather an intellectual and political arsenal, to be moved and galvanised to action. She states calmly and confidently:

Indigenous people have never ceded sovereignty. Yet in any real sense how many people in this room, however good your intentions, genuinely accept Indigenous sovereignty? What does it mean to you? Indigenous people have repeatedly said that we are not being listened to, and despite the Prime Minister’s pledges, governments continue to do things to Aboriginal people, not work with us.¹ We continue to be examined, probed, pitied, blamed for our poor health and socio-economic marginalisation, infantilised, and treated as incapable of finding solutions to the problems that beset our lives. Yet every day Indigenous people are working at local, national or international levels to improve our peoples’ lives and counter ongoing colonialism.

She refuses an easy alignment and rejects settler benevolence and goodwill. When the speaker puts forth a political agenda that questions settlers’ intentions, their willingness to relinquish power, to treat Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as equals – equals who might have a very different understanding of the problems and the solutions – what happens? It’s early summer, not yet mid-morning and already threatening to be a hot day outside. Inside the air conditioning is too high, and many delegates shuffle in their seats, reaching into their bags for another layer of clothing to ward off the chill. Yet the room feels quiet and still. Bodies are so attuned to tension. In the audience, I feel anxiety flare, then swell to indignity and hurt. The room is heavy with worry and fretting. The keynote address ends, the Q&A is brief, as if the questions are stuck in the audience’s throats, and the applause restrained. At morning tea, no one directly addresses or speaks to the feeling, but we hold it close, unwilling to let it go. Maybe someone says she found the speaker a bit rude, aggressive – angry. But most stay quiet; fear being accused of insensitivity, or worse, ignorance and racism. Feelings of hostility and uncertainty linger.

It is a familiar scene, which marks a particular cultural dynamic between progressive settlers and Indigenous people, and one that good white people don’t like to talk about. Throughout this book, I want to better understand why settlers experience Indigenous political will as disturbing and painful, disrupting their sense of self, belonging, ethics and politics. Pity, according to Tony Birch, is the ‘emotion that drives the relationship between conservative and liberal-minded Australians alike in their dealings with Aboriginal people’ (Birch, 2014, p. 41). It is this inequitable and patronising relationship, to borrow from Birch, which is my focus. There is no shortage of pity. However, when Indigenous people refuse settler benevolence, and the accompanying identity of historical victims, and assert political agency, good white people’s response is not pity but a self-defensive anxiety. When they encounter the materiality of Indigenous life, in all of its complexity, strength and vulnerabilities, they are confronted by the limits of settler innocence and goodness and feel uneasy and under siege. Indigenous autonomy and political will threaten a taken-for-granted sense of settler belonging, and a common response is anxiety.

Indigeneity, as scholars have long observed, makes settlers anxious; the claim to land is a sharp reminder that the colonial project is incomplete and settlers are the beneficiaries of its ongoing violence (Byrd, 2011; Fanon, 1963; Tuck & Yang, 2012). The pity identified by Birch – the configuration of sympathy and worrying about Indigenous people – I conceptualise as a form of anxiety that works to displace Indigeneity. Central to this book is a particular demographic for whom, as former Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it, ‘few things matter more than the lot of Indigenous people’ (2015). My interest is, as I indicated in the Preface, ‘good white women’: progressive settler Australians who want to learn about and engage with Indigenous peoples, cultures and social issues. To be more accurate, my protagonists are anxious, good white women. Those who are deeply troubled by the so-called ‘Indigenous problem’: socio-economic inequality; poor health, education, housing; racism; growing incarceration and suicide rates; the closing of remote communities; the ‘loss’ of culture; and the list could go on and on. There is a lot to worry about. All Australians should be alarmed by ongoing discrimination, injustice and disadvantage. However, what does the culture of concern and ‘care’ reveal about settler colonialism?

To be clear, not everyone cares. It is only too obvious that Indigenous issues do not matter to a lot of Australians. Even more so, as Clark and colleagues found in their recent study of non-Indigenous attitudes towards Aboriginal reconciliation, a ‘large body of the population remains disinterested and unengaged’ (2016, p. 2). Indigenous lives remain invisible, their voices go unheard, are met with a powerful form of apathy and inaction or worse with outright hostility and racism (Buchanan, 2012; Davis, 2016; Dodson, 2014). As much as indifference, resentment or aggression are an ever-present backdrop, and bring good white people into sharp relief, it is not the target of my analysis. My intellectual curiosity is animated by what appears to be a contradiction at the ‘heart’ of progressive settler cultural politics: the desire for vital Indigeneity – strong people and culture – an end to (neo)colonialism, and a deep concern about Indigenous well-being, but coupled with an inability to negotiate Indigenous political agency. However, as I will go on to argue, it is not a conflict but rather exposes the architecture of settler colonialism. Notably, I am identifying two modes of anxiety. Firstly, worrying about Indigenous people, which is an evasion of the political: a virtuous anxiety. Secondly, an encounter with the political that interrupts settler certainty and suspends agency. The latter is politically potent, I argue, if it is harnessed to reflect upon what is going on here: not for (poor) me but in settler colonialism’s troubling relationship with Indigenous Australia.

Anxiety is often perceived as an undesirable emotion, a sign of a lack of cultivation and self-control. It is revealing, not so much of the individual but of a cultural dynamic (Pedwell, 2014, p. 56). One’s own anxiety can bring one undone; another’s can make onlookers squirm with embarrassment and discomfort. There is nothing majestic about anxiety. I share Sianne Ngai’s interest in what she refers to as minor affects: envy, anxiety, irritation, boredom and bewilderment (2005, p. 7). These weaker, petty categories of feelings, which she calls ‘ugly feelings’, call attention to ‘real social experience and a certain kind of historical truth’ (2005, p. 5). Minor affects, or ugly feelings, are important, Ngai contends, because they are ambivalent and confusing, thus such feelings are ‘explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release’ (2005, p. 6). Ambivalence obstructs or suspends agency. It is the sudden, however momentary, realisation of helplessness and hopelessness. Such negative emotions evoke pain or displeasure. They can make you feel passive in the face of something significant or what Ngai refers to as ‘powerful powerlessness’ (2005, p. 1). Virtuous anxiety, however, affords catharsis and satisfaction: it displaces the political. Nonetheless, it is activated by brushing up against Indigeneity and colonial complicity. Thus, as I will go on to illustrate, anxiety signals both an evasion and confrontation with Indigenous sovereignty and political will.

In a sense, Indigeneity is everywhere and nowhere. There is the relentless bad news reported by the media, policy announcements, interspersed with occasional good news; Aboriginal television drama’s such as Redfern Now; the burgeoning film industry; celebrated artists, musicians, sports people; and no shortage of corporate and government walls adorned with Indigenous art; and the now commonplace Welcome to Country.² As Ken Gelder discusses:

in the contemporary postcolonial moment, Aboriginal people have more presence in the nation even as so many settler Australians (unlike their colonial counterparts) have less contact with them. Postcolonialism in Australia means precisely this, amongst other things: more presence, but – for non-Aboriginal Australians – less Aboriginal contact.

(2005, p. 172)

His concern, as is mine, is that genuine political encounters have been replaced by mediated images, the personal and social. Settler Australians are often occupied with the powerful realm of the symbolic but rarely engage with Indigenous people. Despite settlers’ lack of contact with Indigenous people, there is no shortage of opinions and judgements. Mainstream perceptions of ‘Aborigines’ and Aboriginality, as Chris Healy outlines, have little to nothing to do with experiences of historical or contemporary Indigenous peoples, but rather are the product of stories inherited from colonists and colonialism (2008, pp. 4–5). What happens when mediated images and colonial stories are swapped for contact with contemporary Indigenous people?

In the following chapters, I analyse very material, visceral encounters between Aboriginal people – who are asserting their ongoing sovereignty, autonomy and self-determination – and good white women. They refuse settler benevolence, pity and authority. I zoom in on and slow down these moments to examine a particular formation of settler anxiety – the worrying, sympathy and self-pity – to argue that it is a displacement and avoidance of the political. However, in the encounters that I survey, the political encounter cannot be easily escaped, and virtuous anxiety is disturbed. Anxiety registers a confrontation with the unfamiliar and interrupts self-mastery (Heidegger, 1973). The world turns into something remote and strange. The subject is rattled, which potentially generates change. One can escape the distress by fleeing into the familiar, the known or seeking reassurance. We need to stay with the discomfort, as Irene Watson advises, and thoughtfully meditate upon how settler colonialism reproduces subjects who desire the luxury and security of exclusive possession, while also limiting good white people’s capacities to reimagine belonging, shared existence, social justice and solidarity (2007). Anxiety exposes a choice: one can step into or evade discomfort.

My protagonists are all pursuing a sense of ethical belonging, and their quests lead them away from the comforts and certainty of ‘home’ into Aboriginal Australia, with whom they desire recognition and acceptance. Instead they find themselves on contested ground; Aboriginal sovereignty is no longer an intellectual or symbolic issue, and they are confronted with their own colonial complicity. They are progressive, educated, middle class, cosmopolitans, whose political and personal identities are tested, and found wanting, in the face of cultural differences and Aboriginal self-determination. Typically, it brings them undone. They are overwhelmed by emotions, are riven with uncertainty and anxiety, questioning and self-absorbed. They feel lost and out of place. Spaces of encounter, such as these, with all their raw, unbridled emotion, are scary and compelling. My ambivalence about anxious white women is not only because I share some of their anxiety (most obviously), but also because, rightly so, there has been a rejection of the emotional self-indulgence of the privileged white woman who is distressed, feels reproached or misunderstood, leaving Indigenous people burdened with comforting her. But there is a danger here. How can good white people understand their desires, if one can only speak of them once they have been made presentable; once passions and conflicts have been extracted? How can we understand the architecture of settler colonialism, renew our imaginative life and contribute to creating ethical settler–Indigenous relations and more just futures if we avoid ugly feelings? The following chapters detail corporeal settler–Indigenous engagements; however, for the remainder of this Introduction, I will outline the project and the broader settler subjectivity that is under examination.

Unsettling Times

There is nothing new in worrying about Indigenous people. It is a mode in which the authority of the settler state is enacted (Fanon, 1963; Mackey, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Indigenous health is an ongoing national anxiety, and the idea that Aboriginal people, as Lea quips, need settlers help is a foundational assumption (2008). For decades, the poor health and socio-economic status of the Indigenous population have been a concern for many progressive white Australians. Indigenous and non-Indigenous professionals and activists have worked in solidarity to improve Indigenous health, socio-economic and political conditions (Kowal, 2015; Land, 2015). There are many notable and inspirational historical and contemporary examples of settler Australians harnessing their concern to support Indigenous resistance, struggles for justice and the establishment of organisations and services that have considerably improved Indigenous lives. There are too many to name, and the history and significance are little known, but just to name a few: The Australian Aborigines’ League, The Federal Council of Aboriginal Affairs Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), Aboriginal legal and medical services, Freedom Rides, land rights campaigns, The Wave Hill Walk Off, 1967 citizenship campaign, and land and environmental protests such as Jabiluka (Attwood, 2003; Land, 2015; McGinness, 1991). There is also a history of white paternalism, including a complete lack of consultation and dialogue, and too many cautionary tales. For those settlers who aspire to collaborate, as Land states, it is ‘important to be familiar with the work of those who have made significant contributions, and as well as those whose practices have been either particularly problematic or particularly positive’ (Land, 2015, p. 53). It is also important to understand our own historical and political moment.

Mainstream Australia has a long history of remembering and forgetting Indigenous people (Healy, 2008). Indigenous activism, as noted, has repeatedly drawn government and non-Indigenous peoples’ attention to, and attempted to intervene in, the systemic erasure of ongoing colonial violence.³ The following chapters span a timeframe from the late 1990s to the present, 2018. I reach back into the years following the implementation of the Native Title Act (1993)⁴ and height of the reconciliation era,⁵ when settler anxieties of belonging were unashamedly articulated. Arguably, this was a time of remembering. If worrying about Indigenous people is a national preoccupation, then what can a re-examination of such anxious times tell about our present? It could be said, fro...