Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture

Michael R. Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134801244
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of colonial governmentality? This collection addresses these and other questions in essays that take up the varied legacies, continuities, modes of memorialization, and poetics of remaking that attend colonial governmentality in spaces as varied as the Maghreb and the Solomon Islands. Highlighting the continued injustices arising from a process whose aftermath is far from settled, the contributors examine works by twentieth-century authors representing Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Europe. Imperial practices throughout the world have fomented a veritable culture of memory. The essays in this volume show how the legacy of colonialism's attempt to transform the mode of life of colonized peoples has been central to the largely unequal phenomenon of globalization.

PART I
Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality

Chapter 1
Regarding Self-Governmentality: Transactional Accidents and Indigeneity in Cape York Peninsula, Australia¹

Timothy Neale

Introduction

In June 2011 I attended a panel devoted to the anthropologist Peter Sutton’s monograph The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. The book had drawn much interest since its publication in 2009, as it argued that the well-publicized conditions of remote Indigenous communities in Australia were in a substantial way the result of their residents’ persistent “classical social behaviors.” More specifically, Sutton claimed that the comparatively high levels of domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and child abuse recorded in these sites were, in his opinion as a leading Australianist anthropologist, partially explained by the continuity of “cultural traditions.”² These traditions had survived the prohibitions of the missionary era between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, he argued, as well as the acquiring of civil and limited community administration rights between the late 1960s and late 1980s. Sutton described this latter period—often known as the “self-determination era”—as “entry into the gates of hell,” claiming that

systems of control and repression imposed on Indigenous people by church, state and private enterprise were generally displaced by the freedoms of liberal democratic policy and its emphasis on community self-management and Indigenous self-determination.³

Socially progressive “liberal” policy passed control back to Indigenous groups unprepared for the responsibility while socially relativist “liberal” tolerance, he added, had prevented political elites from intervening. While Indigenous “culture” was a proximate cause of poverty and alcoholism, Sutton suggested, a “liberal consensus” to dogmatically defend rights to difference was also culpable.⁴

This iconoclastic argument earned the acclaim of many, and when the book won Australia’s most eminent non-fiction prize in late 2010 it proved an opportune time to reflect on its content. The June event included contributions from other prominent anthropologists, ending with Sutton’s own thoughts and, ultimately, an anecdote. As Sutton told it, he had been in a restaurant in New York and discovered, to his surprise, that a young Indigenous man was serving him. Not only was his waiter born in a remote community, he explained, but it was a community in Cape York Peninsula, the massive spur of northeastern Australia where Sutton had spent much of the past three decades working. The coincidence, he added, had deep significance. Sutton’s implied object here was to dispute the problematic contention that Indigeneity is synonymous with life in remote Australia and anathema to cosmopolitan modernity; that Indigenous people can “escape” remote communities and thrive. After the panel, I attempted to explain the anecdote to several friends. It was a banal tale, but one which aligned neatly with the work of the Indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson, whose reform agenda hopes to help Indigenous people move between cultures “from Cape York to New York.”⁵ From Sutton’s mouth, Pearson’s catchphrase seemed less cosmopolitan than diasporic. Was Sutton, I wondered, imagining a geography of relays and returns, or one in which social hope was synonymous with exit into diaspora?

Since 2000, Pearson has been central to public policy interventions in Australia generally and Cape York Peninsula specifically. An activist and advocate turned policymaker, since the early 1990s he has become the most influential private citizen in debates over Indigenous land rights, health, education, and service delivery. Like Sutton, he is typically framed as an agitator or outsider, though this chapter repositions such work as internal to processes of colonial governmentality. While outspoken in their criticisms of certain state actors, neither Sutton nor Pearson question the technical ability of the state, the validity of its metrics, or the legitimacy of its foundation in dispossession.⁶ Metapolitical authority, or “the ability to define the content and scope of ‘law’ and ‘politics,’” remains with the settler state.⁷ Similarly, while Pearson’s work is often historically situated within the “postcolonial” context of official “Reconciliation,” this chapter suggests it is better understood within a longer history of attempts by administrators to construct (and disassemble) different localized groups as both Indigenous and governable; interminable attempts, following Rowse, to produce and manage Indigenous “populations.”⁸ As Tony Bennett has argued, one dominant way in which this occurred in the early twentieth century was through “race,” a category derived from the measurements of different sciences and then redeployed as a matrix of governance.⁹ Bennett notes, following Foucault, that race is only one instance of such réalités de transaction (transactional realities).¹⁰ “Culture,” for instance, may denote or map parts of an autonomous Indigenous domain, but it is also a lens whose application has been incorporated within, and become consistent with, liberal governance.¹¹ Culture, for instance, both works to name an autonomous Indigenous domain of distinct knowledges, practices, jurisdictions, topologies, and so on—in short, Indigenous worlds—while at the same time being a lens whose application has been enthusiastically incorporated within liberal governance. As anthropologist Tess Lea and others have suggested, the “cultural,” like the biomedical and the economic, are naturalized categories in policy today; bureaucrats’ interventions into Indigenous worlds are preceded by training in “Indigenous culture.”¹² As such, while I will not place scare quotes around it, the word culture is used throughout this essay with this caveat. Thus, I am led to ask how Pearson, and the biopolitical interventions he articulates, fit within the production of such transactional realities to constitute and govern “Indigenous people.”

To this consideration of the production of “surfaces” for governance I would like to add an historical-geographical account of the space of governance. Since the first concerted settler invasion in the 1870s, the region of Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland has presented a particular problem to administrators who have, at turns, attempted to create a permanent settler population and “protect” its Indigenous residents. Today, the region—larger than Greece—has a population of fewer than 18,000 people, the majority of whom identify as Indigenous (approximately 55 percent). Almost three-quarters of the region is claimed or possessed as Indigenous land and approximately a fifth is listed as reserve or national park,¹³ but it remains a highly disadvantaged region, with 83 percent of its residents in the most deprived 20 percent of Queensland’s population.¹⁴ Its high levels of unemployment render it an obvious target for various development “solutions,” though, as in the past, the catch-cries of reformists are rarely moderated by the region’s scarcity of private labor markets, its dearth of private capital, its distance from markets, and the universal poverty of its soils. As Bird Rose argues, while the relative depopulation of remote places leads to their rote representation as “wilderness”—caught in the “year zero” of settler incursion— such characterizations perform a twofold forgetting.¹⁵ That is to say, they occlude not only the long history of Indigenous occupation but also the shorter history of what historian Noel Loos has called the Peninsula’s “uncompleted” settlement by white settlers.¹⁶ I will suggest that Pearson’s work should be understood in the context of the latter ongoing and faltering attempts to govern this place as isomorphic space, as a site whose ecology and population are devoid of alterity; an entirely knowable and predictable site. While its name presents it as a deceptively discrete and naturalized entity, “Cape York Peninsula” is an object indelibly shaped by administrators’ attempts to know it and render it governable.

The politics, processes, and outcomes of Pearson’s reforms are of interest in part due to his unprecedented level of influence as an advocate and administrator. Singularly favored within the context of the grossly underfunded Indigenous policy sector, the reception of his “Cape York agenda” as a “success” has led to Pearson being recently commissioned by the federal government to pen a national policy for “empowering communities.”¹⁷ Prime Minister Tony Abbott often describes Pearson as a “prophet.”¹⁸ At the same time, this favor has come in the context of a renewed questioning of the value and efficacy of Indigenous difference, one in which Sutton’s hypothesis regarding the pathological “culture” of remote communities has been highly influential.¹⁹ A second factor motivating this chapter is that Pearson’s avowedly novel approach resembles past attempts to construct both people and place in very clear ways. The launch of a government-funded multimillion-dollar reform project has involved Pearson “seeing like a state,” insisting on the ultimate reality of homo œconomicus—the familiar economically rationalist subjectivity—and the “real economy” of market labor; there is “no separate development path” for Indigenous people, suggesting remote residents should “orbit” out if there is insufficient employment.²⁰ As such, it is particularly pressing to consider how the “Cape York agenda” is articulated in relation to the “surfaces” produced and promoted by state governmentality and to consider its “accidents” in attempting to produce se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Time and Memory “After” Colonial Governmentality
• Part I Continuities: Neocolonialism and Governmentality
• Part II Literature and Culture After Colonial Governmentality
• Bibliography
• Index