Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings

by Edmonds, Penelope

• ISBN13: 9781137304537
• ISBN10: 1137304537
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-03-16
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book examines the performative life reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the affective refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives and, in particular, the way the past is mobilized and reworked in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the 'age of apology'. In search of a new emancipatory politics, the book takes particular account of Indigenous-led refutations or reworkings of consensus politics in public culture. Taking case studies from the USA, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, it traces the prehistory of reconciliation's present in settler states, a critical and contested political process which is especially salient where formal decolonization cannot occur. The dynamic process of drawing on the past to forge new alliances and imagined futures is a crucial aspect of the political realm – one that we are jointly acting out together; and it is worked out from the affective and overlapping spaces of heart and horror.

Author Biography

Penny Edmonds is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Australia. She is the author of Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (2010); co-editor of Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (2010) and co-editor of Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance, and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (2015).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Performing (re)conciliation in settler societies
1. United States - 'Polishing the chain of friendship': Two Row Wampum Renewal celebrations and matters of history
2. United States - 'This is our hearts!' Unruly reenactments and unreconciled pasts in Lakota country
3. Australia - 'Walking Together' for Reconciliation: From the Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk to the Myall Creek Massacre Commemorations
4. Australia - 'Our history is not the last word': Sorry Day at Risdon Cove and 'Black Line' survival ceremony, Tasmania.
5. Aotearoa New Zealand - 'We we did not sign a treaty ... we did not surrender!': Contesting the Consensus Politics of the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand