Paul Alexander Muldoon

Globalisation, neo-liberalism and the struggle for indigenous citizenship

Using indigenous citizenship as a frame, the article examines the deeply ambiguous effects of globalisation for indigenous peoples in the Antipodes. We demonstrate that processes of economic globalisation have had an impact upon New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginals in ways that have heightened their vulnerability and undermined their citizenship entitlements. However, we also argue that Maori and Aboriginal peoples have used the reforms of state practice brought about by globalisation to gain greater control over their existence.

Reconciliation and political legitimacy: the old Australia and the new South Africa

In both Australia and South Africa a state-sponsored discourse of reconciliation has been deployed as a tool of national integration and state building. This usage has tended to encourage a politics of selective memory that runs contrary to the spirit of reconciliation as recognition of different views of the nation. This article seeks to recover (and promote) a more positive concept of reconciliation by treating it as a discursive, democratic space in which different versions of the national story can be acknowledged and negotiated. The cases of Australia and South Africa are used in a mutually illuminating way to explore what “telling the truth” about the past might mean and how such “truth-telling” might help restore legitimacy to liberal states confronted with a “broken moral order”.

Thinking Responsibility Differently: Reconciliation and the Tragedy of Colonisation

This paper explores the limits of conventional legal understandings of responsibility as a means of dealing with the legacies of colonisation of Australia. It suggests that the overriding focus upon ‘moral agency’ in contemporary legal and historical debates may actually restrict or derail the institution of reconciliation as a tool of justice. I suggest that the tragic tradition can enrich or extend our understanding of the reconciliation process, firstly by sponsoring a concept of responsibility that does not take its bearings from the purposes or intentions of the agent and, secondly, by establishing a connection between our spectatorship on the events of the past and the education of compassion.

Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia

As a reoccupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972 demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992 Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.

A reconciliation most desirable: Shame, narcissism, justice and apology:

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.

The constitutional politics of the Aboriginal Embassy

Preface Larissa Behrendt Introduction Gary Foley, Andrew Schaap & Edwina Howell SECTION 1: THE ORIGINS OF THE EMBASSY 1. The Aboriginal Embassy: An account of the protest of 1972 Scott Robinson 2. A Reflection on the first thirty days of the Embassy Gary Foley 3. The Origins of Aboriginal political consciousness and the Aboriginal Embassy, 1907-1972 Gordon Briscoe 4. Aboriginal Protest Leith Duncan 5. Black Power - by any means necessary Edwina Howell 6. Tracking Back: Parallels between the 1920s Aboriginal Political Movements Parallels and 1972 Tent Embassy John Maynard 7. The Freedom Ride Ann Curthoys SECTION 2 THE EVENT OF THE EMBASSY 8. The Beginnings of the Embassy (January 1972) 9. Camping Indefinitely at the Embassy (February-June 1972) 10. Confrontation at the Embassy (July 1972) 11. The Continuing Presence of the Embassy since 1992 SECTION 3 THE LEGACY OF THE EMBASSY 12. Anniversary Reflections 13. The Constitutional Politics of the Aboriginal Embassy Paul Muldoon & Andrew Schaap 14. Stating Genocide in Law Jennifer Balint 15. The spatial politics of Aboriginal protest in the Parliamentary Triangle Kurt Iveson 16. War by Other Means: The Australian War Memorial and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in National Space and Time Fiona Nicoll 17. What do we want? Not native title, thats for bloody sure Nicole Watson

The injustice of territoriality

In recent works Nancy Fraser has developed a model of ‘metademocracy’ that promises to reconcile the competing claims of universal justice (grounded in human rights) and localized democracy (grounded in popular sovereignty). By instituting a global democratic procedure in which all enjoy participatory parity, Fraser hopes to ensure that some people are not denied standing as ‘subjects of justice’ simply because of their territorial location while keeping faith with the democratic commitment to autonomy and self-legislation. Despite the compelling nature of this model, I argue that Fraser fails to bridge the gulf between justice and democracy because her model of metademocracy is built on the ‘metanorm’ of ‘participatory parity’. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I claim that this foundationalist move re-asserts the priority of justice over democracy because it takes equality as a moral given rather than the ever-precarious achievement of human organization.

Between Speech and Silence: The Postcolonial Critic and the Idea of Emancipation

Abstract The concept of emancipation has an increasingly ambivalent status in postcolonial criticism. Under the influence of poststructuralism, the idea that the subaltern subject might overcome colonial relations of cultural domination through acts of self-representation has been thrown into disrepute. If there is to be emancipation, according to this view, it will not come through the recovery of an authentic speaking subject, but through strategies of ‘strategic essentialism’. Here it is argued that this postructuralist approach leaves the subaltern in a politically pre carious position and should be exchanged for the kind of hermeneutic approach that makes possible a genuine politics of recognition.