Abstract
What does it mean for a settler spectacle to arrive dressed not as hand-wringing white fragility but as a muscular, entitled pontification masquerading as critical urban theory? ‘Regarding the pain of Indigenous Others’ is just such a spectacle. Claiming to be a ‘critical’ account of the racialized dynamics of a contemporary city, it turns the analytical gaze onto racialized others in a manner that reconstitutes colonial relations of power and ways of thinking and knowing. It knows and proclaims ‘about’ these racialized others entirely unhooked from relational responsibility. While claiming concern for performative spectacles in settler societies, it is a perfect example of precisely such a spectacle. Perhaps it is an example of what Ahmed (2004) observes as non-performativity: where statements do not do what they say but work towards other ends. In this case, tactics of shock and awe, soaked in racial anxiety (see the long footnote), work in the service of an entitlement to be a knower and proclaim knowing-ness about others for the benefit of ‘urban research’.
In her article about the spectacle of reconciliation, Daigle (2019) writes about a particularly virulent manifestation of this spectacle: a public, large-scale and visually striking performance of Indigenous suffering and trauma alongside white settler mourning and recognition – which secures, legitimates, and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity in Canada. (p4)
Wyly's settler spectacle writes against such facile desires as ‘reconciliation’, of course, and he is not wringing his hands. Indeed, he claims a stance of critique, (non)performing the work of drawing attention to colonialism and race (including citing Daigle's paper) in a way that obscures precisely those dimensions that would have been helpful to bring carefully and clearly into view. The result, then, is a deployment of trauma to serve. Quite what it's serving is less clear… being the guy who says the controversial thing, gathering the citational benefit along the way? For our collective benefit ‘in the field’ to have a difficult conversation, one that not only reiterates but also deepens our co-dependency on the trauma of others? For this paper is most surely not serving justice and healing. You will find no responsible relationships of accountability and reciprocity here, either to the people for whom such trauma is a living reality or to a genuine interest in contributing to healing a deeply wounded world.
In fact, I found this article so incomprehensible, absurd and damaging I feel both unable and unwilling to respond to its substance (well, I couldn’t locate it's substance). Perhaps, I mused on my third attempt at writing this commentary, it was not written to be understood, given the series of swaggering gotcha moments which the reader is asked to endure. The matter it raises however is a very serious one about responsibility. Responsibility about what we choose to write, how we do so and to what ends. These seem especially important in such a structurally and materially violent world.
I am not an authority to write about such things. The places I turned to in an attempt to make sense of the horror I felt at this article have been touchstone places for continual learning in my life. And so, if you also managed to get all the way through Wyly's article, then as an antidote I recommend reading those I have cited in the reference list below. In what follows I draw solace and determination from what these thinkers continue to teach me.
In her important essay ‘what happens when you tell somebody else's story’, Waanyi novelist and scholar Wright (2016) observes the ‘shameful and injurious impact that many public stories have had on our people over a long period of time’. She refers here to First Peoples of so-called Australia. How stories are shared and told, by whom and what ends they serve really do matter. I feel this is what Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) meant when she observed how writing is dangerous. Even stories that are tucked away in the pages of an academic journal, locked behind paywalls and so obscure most normal people wouldn’t read them anyway. Regardless, the telling of such stories, and especially the manner of their telling, do work in the world – thickening layers of entitlement, deepening the calcification of racialized hierarchies of who will be deemed knowers and who will be deemed subjects to be known about. As Wright (2016) observes: ‘When it comes to how our stories are being told, supposedly on our behalf, or for our interest or supposed good, it has never been a level playing field. We do not get much of a chance to say what is right or wrong about the stories told on our behalf – which stories are told or how they are told. It just happens, and we try to deal with the fallout.’
The ‘white witness’ is one of the ways in which a knower gets to display his entitlement to knowing and writing about others as Blak and Black thinkers have been observing for a long time (see McQuire 2019; Watego 2021). The white witness works as an all-knowing expert, powerful in their ‘willingness to sustain coloniser mythologising’ (Watego 2021, p56) of what will be formulated as ‘the problem’. The white witness, Amy McQuire observes ‘thrives on accounts of the brutalisation of black bodies, most commonly of black women and children’ (2019). Witnessing in this way is a contemporary iteration of racist and colonial violence marking a subtle if powerful innovation in the instantiation of racial hierarchies. ‘Once we were massacred’ Watego observes, ‘now we are researched – known only ever to be erased’ (Watego 2021, p27).
Watego's conceptualisation of erasure is resonant with Joanne Barker's who defines erasure ‘not as a making absent – a vanishing act – but a making particularly present’ (Barker 2018 p20). The work of ‘regarding’ in Wyly's article makes racialized others hyper-visible: from the harmful decision to recount (and publish) in graphic detail the abuse and death of children for an apparently ‘gotcha’ point revealed much later, through to the racialized accounting of property ownership to prove an obscurely made point about reparations. Yes, racialized others are hyper-visible indeed. But this visibility is limited to the lens of the problem or dysfunction as defined. It is a cruel visibility, but that's long been a strategy of colonial and racial hierarchy.
Such accounting and recounting does not ‘presence’ in McQuire's (2022, 2023) articulation, the actuality of lives, realities, systems of domination or relational responsibilities. Accounts, masquerading as analysis, of the lineages of property ownership but with no illumination of proprietorship should alert us to a sleight of hand underway – a hyper-visibility whose function is erasure. Accounts, again masquerading as analysis, of graphic violence but with no illumination of the structures of violence within which they are situated or the violence involved in severing those accounts from relationships of responsibility should also immediately register writing about others in ways that serve to erase.
Normally, the mode of such erasure is of the hand-wringing fragile kind. Wyly's article is an example of an emerging manifestation – the weaponisation of erasure disguised as progressive critical intervention. Recently, a book in a similar vein by a settler scholar caused a stir here where I write from in so-called Australia. Gomeroi scholar Whittaker (2019) reviewed the book and I went back to her review in preparing this commentary. Her writing helped me find some handholds to figure out why Wyly's article made me feel so utterly unmoored. I found resonance with Whittaker's disquiet as she reflected on the labour of encountering writing ‘by settlers that each stake a claim to the “truth” about us – even if the truth is “step back and listen”’ (Whittaker 2019). Such writing is offered to ‘a particular kind of white for whom this is intellectual tourism into our alleged dysfunction’ (ibid). Yes, I thought, this seems how Wyly's paper is pitched and might be received. Further, such writing often opines a ‘kind of self-condemning or self-minimisation that secures them a legitimate authoritative stake in anti-racism’ (ibid).
Erasure is also at work in the obscuring, under layers of apparently progressive commentary, the actuality of white governance and colonial supremacy. When a writer sets up an account offering commentary on the nature of our condition but then fails to actually account for the structure of our condition, then the attention too often falls on those deemed exemplars of a problem that is always in his power to define. Wyly's paper ‘fails to turn inward and see itself’ (Whittaker 2019) because all the attention is trained on others. Consequently, it obscures the actual functioning of racial hierarchies and colonialist tropes. Returning to Daigle, settler spectacles such as this do not merely ‘assume a passive role of spectator or voyeur, but take on active roles in a spectacular performative politics that depoliticises Indigenous–settler relations, rather than activating political agencies that are accountable to Indigenous peoples on whose lands they live and work’ (2019, p5).
The muscular exercise apparent in this paper is of course one of privilege, derived from colonisation and racial hierarchies. The long footnote attempting to reckon with this privilege does nothing of the sort, instead moving towards innocence (Mawhinney 1998) through a bizarre self-condemnation. It perpetuates colonisation because it does nothing to upend the racialised relationship of white knowers and Indigenous/migrant others. Writing such as this, masquerading as scholarship, is too often practiced with impunity. Such writing deepens the ideological foundations upon which knowledge about inferiority and dysfunction are built (Watego 2021) and the entitlement to make proclamations about such alleged dysfunction for the kind of intellectual tourism we as readers are invited to engage in here. Wyly asks us to quite literally look down upon events he narrates as dysfunction from the vantage point of a small plane circling over a city. Through a ‘shock horror’ style he recounts statements steeped in carceral logics without ever turning to abolitionist thinking to more humbly and powerfully consider how carcerality actually works.
When confronted with the need to bear witness to violence as we so often are, particularly violence that derives from colonial, racist structures, we have a responsibility to bear witness in ways that do not further perpetuate that violence. This is the teaching of Darumbal and South Sea Island scholar Amy McQuire through her humble but powerful work on ‘presencing’ (2022, 2023). McQuire's work is situated in deep relationships of care and reciprocity with the families of women and girls who have been disappeared by gendered colonial violence in Australia. She analyses intimate, specific acts of violence within wider structures of violence that perpetuate telling and re-telling as acts of erasure. In her PhD thesis on the work of media reporting of disappeared Indigenous women and girls, she describes the importance of asking ‘how could I ensure that my own work was not in turn, violent?’ (2023, p67). She asks this because the materials in her research invited a reiteration of what had been said about Indigenous women and girls. McQuire reflects on this problem: But analysing discourses of what has been ‘said’, does not tell me what has been left ‘unsaid’; and by simply repeating these dehumanising representations, even while dismantling them, I am reproducing that same violence that I claim to be critiquing. (2023: 69)
For those located as I am – as a settler, carrying types of privilege that means my body is already anticipated and already defined as normal and belonging – our role and responsibility is serious. To challenge enduring colonial representations by productively turning our analysis upon how race functions in the world AND in the practice of our own work, indeed in the very structure of academic work. To reckon with the terms of the field, such as the categories that work to define and abstract for knowing and writing about. Definitions have always, as Morrison (1987: 190) observed, belonged to the definers, not the defined. Our responsibility is at the very least to be constantly vigilant to the seduction of entitlement by asking: am I writing about others? Is that activating an account ‘where those most spoken about [are] never themselves heard’ (Wright 2016)? If so, then what has beguiled me into such a position, and what kind of attachments are energising that desire?
Returning to Daigle's observation, we have a responsibility to expose and pull down that which ‘secures, legitimates and effectively reproduces white supremacy and settler futurity’. McQuire's work (2023) offers a methodology for making that real, with five key planks: Responsibility, Reciprocity, Repatriation, Relationality and Resurgence (p159). Listen to her words (2023, p160) about responsibility and reciprocity: With Responsibility, we acknowledge that we do not own the story… With Reciprocity, we realise that our stories [must not be] ‘extractive’, but instead, are to be used to give back to the communities we write about…
Take them to heart.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
