colonialism
Dear friends,
Did you know that the pain experienced by ocean life suffocated during mass farming for human consumption has been quantified in asphyxiation statistics[1]?
Taking for granted, for a moment, that studies such as these are done in the face of such terrible human cruelty, I’d like to spend some time thinking about the primacy of capitalist logics in science. In a workshop yesterday, I spent some time with medical scientists where we discussed the philosophy of science – not in terms of sitting cross legged resting chins on fists, but in terms of thinking about frequently unquestioned assumptions in science. During this discussion we came to grips, quite quickly actually, with the inhumanity of “science”. Indeed, the entire conversation began a little like this:
“We’re scientists, so we are stripped of our humanity, ourselves and our presence in our writing before we even think about writing.”
Many have posited that this dehumanising process tacitly occurs in positivist sciences[2]. The demand for an objective view of reality, which is essential to the belief that science can be objective, requires the scientist erasing themselves from the work. This belief, that humans cannot be objective, drives a deeply rationalist approach to science, and enables a greater divide between the natural/physical and social sciences. This division has historically constructed some sciences as more valid and asserts that human involvement demands subjectivity which pollutes the ‘truth’, but this is all a cover for the real politics of science. Moreover, the supposed validity of natural and physical sciences comes at a human cost, both of the scientist as person, worker, thinker, and so on, and more broadly in their knowing and doing. Let me simplify.
To do natural science, as my workshop friends put it, consist of “pipetting things and recording the change/s”. In the transmission of the science, the changes are communicated. There is no active role for the human, other than perhaps to record error, or declare funders and ‘influences’. Natural sciences, here, are largely dehumanised. While there are some post-positivist emergences, the vast majority of natural and, perhaps more importantly, biological sciences remain bound by a tradition which either brackets human involvement or demands their erasure in the communication process. To verify, validate, or confirm the results, other dehumanised nodes contribute validatory studies. And together, this canon of ‘objective’ literature decides how objective, how valid, and how controlled something is while ever bracketing human involvement.
The point of rupture in this paradigm is learning that something humans did – an experimental technique, a way of working, or a way of reporting the work – invalidated the result in an earlier link in the chain of investigation. Let’s take a result close to home, in anthropology to start (“a social science?!”, you say, well, yes, it’s a golden example), then we’ll look at two more:
In traditional anthropology there is an active claim that the tradition provides objective descriptions of “primitive” cultures. However, critics showed how anthropologist’s presence, cultural assumptions, and power dynamics inevitably shaped what they observed and how communities responded. Indeed, the very assumption of “primitive” coloured the supposedly objective reporting. As a response reflexive anthropology was born and goes some way toward acknowledging the researcher as an active participant rather than a neutral recorder[3]. But let’s turn to some natural science examples.
Microbiology had traditionally focused on pathogenic bacteria as invaders to be eliminated[4]. But this paradigm was built around human cultural concepts of cleanliness and contamination. The shift to understanding humans as ecosystems revealed that our bodies are fundamentally collaborative communities with microbes - challenging the human/nature divide that had been unconsciously structuring the field[5].
And finally, for decades, researchers treated lab animals as standardised biological machines, assuming their behaviour reflected “pure” genetic or physiological responses. But studies revealed that handling by researchers, laboratory conditions, and even the gender of experimenters significantly altered animal stress hormones, immune function, and behaviour[6]. This forced recognition that the human research environment was “invisibly” shaping the natural biological processes being studied[7].
We should also turn attention to colonisation, particularly given our brief look at anthropology, a discipline often critiqued by the natural and physical sciences for its “failings” from subjectivity. In social sciences we see a great deal of justified critique of supposed objectivity, to the point that the language used in many social sciences has moved towards “reliability” and “truthfulness” rather than “validity” and “confirmation”. But this detouring from natural and physical scientific terms does not fundamentally challenge the politics of science. Colonialism, in particular in regard to anthropology, has been revealed as one of the driving forces of supposed objectivity from social scientists, allowing assumptions of subjects’ “primitivism” and “evolution”. This was source of justification for ever more violent colonial practices. But this is not the only effect of colonisation on science, indeed science itself – objective or not – is constructed within a western (European) epistemological and political framework which has always assumed hierarchies of things: man over woman, capitalist over worker, white over black, and so on.
It is important that we weave together all sciences under a “western”, or Eurocentric, canon – an epistemology (way of knowing) which inherently contains hierarchies, ways of working, assumptions about superiority, justifications for violence, and more. Indeed, even within the episteme, there are critiques of natural and physical sciences from social scientists which have had some impact on a trend of discussing the affect of the presence of and role of the researcher and their politics and conditions on the research outcomes[8].
Far from being an objective, universal method of understanding the world, western scientific frameworks embed hierarchical power structures that serve to justify colonial violence and continue to marginalise Indigenous ways of knowing[9]. Colonialism did not “misuse” science; it fundamentally shaped what counts as scientific knowledge, who can be a legitimate knower, and how knowledge should/could be validated[10]. Mignolo, for instance, has examined epistemic disobedience arguing that western epistemology maintains knowledge hierarchies through the hubris of the zero point (from Castro-Gómez), the false claim of neutral, objective observation[11].
Historical evidence demonstrates time and again that scientific work did not accidentally support colonialism. It was deliberately designed to provide intellectual justification for colonial violence and exploitation. Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) is often used to exemplify this explicit connection. Working against these hierarchies and political positioning – the use of the western canon of research as a false prophet for the eradication of “the other” – has required a lifetime of scholarly work and activism to put a blip on the radar of challenging the west’s political epistemic and scientific “dominance”. With the explosion of Critical Indigenous Studies, following radical thinkers such as Distinguished Professor Aunty Moreton-Robinson, multiple ways of knowing have become more recognised. The fundamental politics of western knowledge, however, remains largely under-critiqued by the hegemony – the mainstream. More calls for solidarity and allyship from this mainstream surface by the day[12] and remarkable dynamism from Indigenous thinkers adapt and transform the political methods of western research approaches to community contexts[13] or challenge them fundamentally[14]. However, additional comradery is ever required to challenge the dominance of the racist, sexist, and pro-capitalist modality woven into science.
At this juncture it becomes important that we discuss how capitalism treats the anglophone, western, or Eurocentric episteme. This is nowhere more manifest than the way capitalism treats research and researchers – and conditions the role and nature of the university, the research institute, or the laboratory. Indeed, in our current moment interesting political forces are (re)shaping the role and nature of research and universities in a paradigm that has so deeply captured the academic imaginary it has become a top 5 bingo card buzzword in papers, lectures, forums, interviews, discussions, books and so much more. Neoliberalism, the politics of knowledge and production under late capitalism, suggests to most of its users a set of radically unfair conditions, regressions to policy and place, and a distortion of the very nature of science.
We explored above a few ways in which science has been challenged from the margins. There are endless calls from Indigenous thinkers who have succeeded in rattled mainstream sciences to demand truth, action, and transformation. As these calls convert to action in our institutions, the broader political landscape which demands science to justify the actions of the oppressor (capitalists) is metastasising to an antiscientific modality. Rather reckon with the ills of the past and present, the capitalist political apparatus has turned its attention toward disinformation to justify its extremism. Within episteme conditioned by science, this leads critical thinkers, educators, and compassionate people to question the political world. This turn pushes universities and research institutes ever more into the active political sphere, which the antiscientific extremist capitalism uses as further justification for more extreme crackdowns on workers the world over.
Look no further than the “insane” configuration of world leadership at this moment. From Anthony Albanese supporting gas projects which simultaneously risk utter destruction of world heritage listed Aboriginal rock art, and unleashes thousands of tonnes of CO2 into an already >3º global warming trajectory, to Donald Trump’s unwavering support of the Israeli genocidal regime threatening nuclear destruction of a middle eastern nation, the post-truth world asks for no science to rationalise its descent into madness. We’re also seeing increasingly despotic leadership of public institutions, from government departments led by the antivaxxing ilk of RFK Jr., to the appointment of vice chancellors with multi-million-dollar salaries. There is, no longer, a need for truth, objectivity, or rationality – as “the other” ever shifts into new political enemies to drive the 3 year political cycle, the 24 hour news cycle, or any other capitalist directed time blind fugue state.
This moment demands a new epistemology, drawn on a relational ontology, that centres ecology not economy. What science does offer is an intellectually curious graveyard, which has oft bracketed the very nature of humanity while being utterly human. Flawed, but capable of learning and change. What we need is a curious, compassionate, and co-created future. One that does not look at the agony endured by fish in human murder and say “that’s worth $30 million dollars” but looks at agony, suffering, and the utter destruction of our oceans[15] and says – enough.
Together, by (re)centering relationality and care, we can find a better way to think. A better way to do. And a better way to be. We can do that with the help of science, education, and collaboration, or we can go the way of the dictators, and rationalise ourselves out of existence to the point that madness rules. The choice, to me, is clear. Is it clear to you?
In solidarity,
Aidan
See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-objectivity/#AcceScieHypoValuNeut and https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287572 ↩︎
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: a School of American Research Advanced Seminar. University of California Press. ↩︎
Bhaskar, R. (1975). A realist theory of science (1st ed.). York. ↩︎
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (Second edition). Zed Books. ↩︎
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263276409349275 ↩︎
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/research-is-ceremony/9781552662816/ ↩︎
https://apnews.com/article/ocean-film-attenborough-climate-848a65883fc1ec2601550d3cbfb0e36a ↩︎
Dear friends,
I have been thinking a lot about the ABC’s federal election coverage. Partly, concerned about how they continue to adhere to a 2PP system when clearly the Liberal/National coalition is seriously trending towards minor/fringe party, and partly about the way they continue to aid the shifting of the Overton window (rightward). But, today, I have a specific concern. I am concerned about the vilification of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Woo up – I can hear you saying from here – and while I naturally disagree with her on: bordering on 100% of her policy stances; her internal and external displays of racism; and her general lack of empathy and compassion – racialised responses to her are worthy of criticism. To be clear, I believe that any member of the LNP, actually anyone even so much as voting for the LNP, has a complete lack of empathy (maybe licking too much lead paint as a child). Their policies are more often than not extreme right, and they deserve no mercy.
However, Senator Price is not an idiot because she’s Blak, she’s an idiot because she’s a LNP Senator.
The media and liberals (note the small l) racialising and vilifying an Aboriginal person on the basis of identity is never okay. To get where we’re headed, we need to do a little digging into subliminal and covert racism first. Then we’ll “circle back” to how the deployment of the ABC’s vilification worries me theoretically, and it’s got nothing to do with being apologetic for the LNP – far from it. Rather, we need to examine the discursive normalisation of racism “when it’s someone the public mightn’t like”.
Covert racism is everywhere in Australia [1]. We may well be one of the most racist countries on the planet. This, naturally, extends and manifests significantly in political discourse in the country, both explicitly (think Pauline) and through subtle mechanisms that escape immediate detection, while reinforcing racialised power dynamics. The manifestation of this where Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander politicians are concerned, regardless of conservative or progressive political ideology, is a complex dynamic. Where Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is concerned, this emerges wherein criticism becomes entangled with racialised expectations of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander political expression.
Unlike overt racism characterised by explicit bigotry, covert racism, here, operates through “neutral” language that subjects Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander conservative figures to distinct scrutiny not applied to their non-Aboriginal counterparts [2]. The delegitimisation occurs not through rejection of their Indigeneity per se, but through implicit suggestions that their political positions represent a form of false consciousness or cultural betrayal. These frameworks are rarely, if ever, imposed upon white politicians whose ideological positions face opposition.
Covert racism, within progressive discourse, conflates otherwise genuine policy critique with racialised expectations of how Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander politicians “should” position themselves politically. The paradox rests where those who rightfully criticise racist structures simultaneously perpetuate ‘subtle’ forms of racial essentialism by presupposing authentic Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander political expression should necessarily align with progressive ideologies. Critical race theorists call this ‘progressive paternalism’, where well-intentioned advocacy nonetheless reproduces colonial power dynamics by constraining Indigenous political agency within predetermined boundaries. Thus, even within anti-racist movements, unexamined assumptions about racial authenticity and political expression continue to reproduce racial hierarchies which they, in other circles, purport to aim to dismantle. Okay, so, back to the election coverage.
A pattern of differential treatment emerged in how panellists engaged with Senator Price compared to her white conservative counterparts. While Coalition figures were afforded space to articulate their positions – even when they were outright lies – with minimal interruption, Price faced a barrage of challenging questions delivered with sceptical undertones and frequent interjections over her which undermined her authority. This asymmetrical application of journalistic scrutiny manifested, as described above, in persistent ways. This included dismissive body language, interrogative tones reserved specifically for her segment, and a readiness to contest her statements that wasn’t mirrored in exchanges with white conservative parliamentarians. The panelists’ tendency to respond to Price’s perspectives with immediate challenges rather than the consideration extended to others revealed an unconscious double standard that positioned her contributions as inherently less credible.
The differential treatment operated at the intersection of gender and racial bias, where Price absorbed disproportionate criticism that could have been directed at her party’s collective policy positions [3]. Almost as though the ABC were withholding their blows on white politicians who are equally, if not more-so, responsible for the policy platform – because it’s “okay to criticise a blackfella”. Naturally, paradoxically, Price would likely endorse such an attack on herself, just not of her policy platform, and so this should read in no way as a defence of her (it’s not). While white, typically male, Coalition representatives made similarly, if not more extreme, controversial statements without significant pushback, Price’s assertions were framed as requiring additional verification or dismissed through subtle facial expressions and tone shifts that signalled disbelief to viewers.
These ever present and ongoing patterns of racialised responses to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples might be described as heightened scrutiny bias, where marginalised individuals in positions of authority face intensified examination of their competence and credibility, particularly when their political alignment doesn’t fit with the paternalism of the liberal centre. The implicit message conveyed through these interactions suggested that Price’s perspectives, values, and positioning were less legitimate than those of her white colleagues, despite her equal standing as an elected representative.
Liberals (qua political alignment) often perpetuate a problematic dynamic through their selective accountability mechanisms that unconsciously reproduce colonial hierarchies. Despite “progressive” intentions, many liberals apply standards to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander conservative figures such as Price that presuppose a singular ‘authentic’ Indigenous (political) identity, one they decide is aligned with “progressive” values. This essentialising implicitly denies Indigenous people the same political complexity and ideological diversity afforded to white Australians. The disproportionate scrutiny directed at Price, while allowing white conservatives to escape similar interrogation, doesn’t show principled consistency, but that there are unexamined expectations about how Indigeneity ‘should’ position a person ideologically. And, while perhaps it “should”, on the basis of ethics and morals, condition one toward left-wing platforms, it is still no less “valid” to be Indigenous and conservative, nor should this cast into question one’s personhood.
To move toward genuinely decolonial politics, liberals need to reconstruct their approach to political critique by prioritising consistent standards across racial lines. And heavens know those anti-racist standards need to rise. The ABC’s tacit “equal voice” empowering One Nation, Katter, and Trumpet of Patriots, while marginalising the Greens requires significant scrutiny. This should be done alongside interrogating unconscious racial expectations about Indigenous political expression, which currently characterises ‘acceptable’ racism and is supported by the media, which is unacceptable. A decolonial approach separates substantive policy critique from identity-based delegitimisation, ensuring that criticism focuses specifically on policy positions rather than implicit questioning of authenticity. While we’re examining things, we should also take a moment to think even further on paternalism particularly in how it was mobilised by ABC panellists when discussing Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander politicians, concerns, and priorities both in election coverage and out.
For Critical Indigenous Studies, paternalism remains a chronic colonial mechanism that circumscribes Indigenous political agency through the guise of protection or benevolent guidance [4]. Scholars, including Distinguished Professor Aunty Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Professor Larissa Behrendt have identified how paternalism operates as a living form of colonial governance by positioning non-Indigenous actors as more capable of determining Indigenous interests than Indigenous peoples ourselves. This paternalism is clear in assumptions that Indigenous conservatives, for instance, must be operating from false consciousness or internalised oppression rather than any political conviction [5]. Again, we’re not agreeing with the LNP, just disagreeing with racial characterisation.
The paternalistic gaze, which works concomitantly with differential treatment and covert racism, functions to domesticate Indigenous political expression by casting certain forms as legitimate. Paternalism continues the colonial project, replacing explicit subjugation with subtler but equally damaging epistemic violence that presume to know what constitutes ‘proper’ Indigenous politics and identity [6]. Decolonial scholars the world over emphasise that genuine self-determination necessitates recognising Indigenous peoples’ right to political diversity, including the right to hold conservative positions without having our Indigeneity questioned or our agency undermined through paternalistic modes which position non-Indigenous observers as better arbiters of Indigenous authenticity than Indigenous people.
Critical Indigenous Media studies has documented how mainstream Australian media consistently reproduces colonial power relations through its differential treatment of Indigenous political figures [7]. When examining figures like Price, media discourse frequently employs deficit discourses that position conservative Indigenous peoples’ voices either as exceptional outliers or as fundamentally compromised by their association with conservative politics. The issue, again, being the racialised application of such views. The representational violence is subtle, linguistic and visual. From interruptions, to skeptical facial expressions and challenging tones, there are collective signals to audiences that certain Indigenous political expressions require additional scrutiny.
All these behaviours from the media, heck even your friends, enact a form of epistemological violence that positions Indigenous knowledge and political expression within subjectified boundaries and hierarchies of expression. The deploying of a verification process, predominantly by white institutional gatekeepers, reinforces colonial hierarchies that position whiteness as the unmarked standard against which Indigenous political expression is measured, evaluated, and frequently found wanting. It’s racist. It’s wrong.
So, let’s do better. Let’s end racism – especially on the left, friends,
Aidan
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. ↩︎
Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press. ↩︎
c.f. Fforde, C., Bamblett, L., Lovett, R., Gorringe, S., & Fogarty, B. (2013). Discourse, deficit and identity: Aboriginality, the race paradigm and the language of representation in contemporary australia. Media International Australia, 149(1), 162–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X1314900117 ↩︎
Behrendt, L. (2016). Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. University of Queensland Press. ↩︎
Martin, K. L. (2012). Please knock before you enter: Aboriginal regulation of outsiders and the implications for researchers. Post Pressed. ↩︎
Rankine, J., & McCreanor, T. (2021). Mass media representations of Indigenous peoples. In P. Bilimoria, J. Bapat, P. Hughes, & D. Keown (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of contemporary Indigenous religion (pp. 226-237). Routledge. ↩︎
Langton, M. (2008). The end of 'big men' politics. Griffith Review, 22, 48-57; Bond, C. (2019). The irony of the Aboriginal banking apologetics. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 15(3), 243-249. ↩︎
Dear friends,
You may have observed that I’ve been pondering the nature of our broken worlds, in particular how this has deep effects on our bodies. From immovable structures, (self)imposed or otherwise, to external features of capitalist system(s) which offer a guise of stability and security but, in reality, limit human agency to capitalist realism, we are conditioned to work above all. This is of interest to me, as I continuously engage with friends and colleagues who suffer with physical ailments derived from constant exposure to high-stress environments. We are so conditioned with this that even our language fails adequately describe how aversely we react to our experienced environments, and often exact even further tolls on ourselves by internalising that which should be processed communally. Just today, I was talking to friends about self-imposed structures that condition agency under the guise of anti-capitalist movement, but in reality, exact tolls on mental health that are tantamount to the same violations of self and community. Sound familiar? No? Let me expand.
Let’s first turn to First Peoples’ perspectives on the role of emotional, cultural, social and place-based tolls on the body. Experienced through connection with country and community, the phenomenon of embodied trauma shows a severing, or disconnection between a person and their community, country or role. We might understand across much of the global south and in First Nations communities the world over that existence is fundamentally relational and cyclical. Here, disruptions to right relations (i.e., caring for country, community, and so on) manifest as embodied distress. For many knowledge systems, there is an inherent recognition that human bodies exist within intricate webs of kinship, relationship, and responsibility that extend beyond human communities to include more-than-human relations, ancestral connections, and spiritual dimensions, as well as connections to place. Colonial capitalism has systematically targeted these relational networks through land dispossession, (cultural) genocide, and the imposition of extractive temporalities that sever these connections as they did in enclosures before them.
The enforced separation from land-based practices, ceremonial rhythms, and intergenerational knowledge transmission creates conditions where trauma becomes inscribed in both ‘individual bodies’ and in collective, intergenerational experience, bodies, lands and thought. Globally, a great deal of First Nations healing traditions understand wellness as emerging from balanced relationships between physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions — a harmony of (eco)systems that oppressive systems deliberately disrupt through the colonial project’s ongoing violence.
First Nations frameworks for understanding embodied distress may centre concepts of balance, reciprocity, and cyclical time that stand in direct opposition to capitalism’s linear extraction, accumulation, and exploitation. Our body’s manifestation of illness under stress represents, not personal ‘malfunction’, a profound truth-telling about the violation of natural laws and proper relations — the body bearing witness to the unsustainability of systems that fragment our fundamental interconnectedness with all relations. So, yeah, our systems are pretty fucked for us as humans — and this is nearly universal.
In a “western” paradigm, the human body exists as a biopsychosocial system where trauma becomes inscribed upon both psychological memory and a kind of somatic reality. The body’s stress response mechanisms, evolved for acute survival situations, become chronically activated under persistent socioeconomic pressures, leading to allostatic load and physiological dysregulation. I’m going to hurl some more words at you now and we’ll regroup in a moment — don’t hold your breath. Neuroendocrine pathways, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, translate emotional distress into inflammatory cascades, immunosuppression, and literally altered gene expression through epigenetic modifications. With capitalism’s increasing precarity, fascist authoritarian turn, and global distress, comorbid with relentless productivity demands and insecure socioeconomic conditions, creates a state of perpetual hypervigilance that fundamentally contradicts our neuro/biological need for rhythmic alternation between engagement and restoration. This systematic mismatch between our ‘evolutionary design’ and contemporary socioeconomic structures manifests as embodied distress — the body’s material critique of systems that violate its fundamental requirements for regulation, connection, and meaning. So, yeah, capitalism also messes up our sleep patterns, capacity for rest and renewal, and we get into even more trouble.
Sleep offers a fundamental ‘neurobiological rhythm’ where the brain undergoes essential maintenance processes: synaptic homeostasis, memory consolidation, and metabolic waste clearance. Capitalist temporalities systematically destabilise and disrupt this through productivity imperatives and chronobiological destabilisation [1]. First Nations frameworks understand sleep as an important liminal and connective state which supports connectivity with ancestral knowledge, wisdom from dreams, and other spiritual dimensions, an ontologically rich experience. Colonial capitalist temporalities deliberately fragmented these through ‘settler time’ [2] the imposition of mechanistic, production-oriented temporalities that sever people from rhythms and dream-based knowledge systems which secure to cultural continuity and healing practices.
From this position of understanding physical effects of capitalist “structures” on the body, we should now turn briefly to how we engage with this as human ‘agents’ against systemic capital/colonial ‘structure’. Or engage once again with the structure and agency debate to try and negotiate some space for individual and collective resistance to (self)imposed harms.
We’ve discussed before how the tension between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ exists within a dialectical framework where subjects are simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of social structures. Foucault offers a prominent example in which he discusses how power operates through repression and through productive processes that shape subjects’ self-understanding and perceived possibilities [3]. Althusser offers interpellation, which discusses how ideological state apparatuses produce subjects who misrecognise our structural determinations as freely chosen identities [4]. And late capitalism’s particular innovation lies in its capacity to subsume resistance through commodification while naturalising its contradictions through increasingly sophisticated cultural technologies that manufacture consent while concealing structural violence behind ‘discourses’ of individual responsibility and meritocratic fantasy [5]. So, there are myriad theoretical frames through which to understand capitalism’s bullshit. Some of them empower us to take action as resistance, such as literally ‘sleep as resistance’, others suggest that structural reform must be negotiated or seized through activist transformation. But either way, the violence of capitalism is long conceived as a physical violence – whether by spear or by ideology.
First Nations conceptualisations, on the other hand, fundamentally reconfigure structure-agency binaries through relational ontologies, where personhood emerges through kinship networks extending beyond individual humans into communities. Agency exists far beyond individual autonomy through responsible participation within complex reciprocal relationships across deep time [6]. Colonial capitalist structures operate through what ongoing settler colonial governmentality and violence and deliberately targets First Nations relational autonomy through ontological impositions that fragment collective governance systems and connection to country. Resurgence movements have conceptualised decolonial agency beyond ‘individual liberation’ (‘take the white hand’) as the revitalisation of governance systems, ceremonial practices, and language reclamation that restore proper relationships. There’s powerful resistance offered here, and more powerful futuristic thinking available in relation and conversation.
Contestation of these interlocking systems of ‘embodied exploitation’ requires multi-dimensional approaches grounded to ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’ [7]. Prefigurative politics that embody different temporalities and ontologies such as degrowth movements, create practices that honour biological rhythms and ecological limits while resurgence frameworks articulated centre Country’s reclamation and revitalization, also serving as pathways toward communal healing. Disability justice movements offer crucial insights into sustainable activism ways of being that honour bodily limits and interdependence as sources of wisdom rather than limitations to overcome [8]. These convergent movements gesture toward social arrangements fundamentally organised around care relationships rather than capital accumulation, where thriving becomes possible through the cultivation of social infrastructure which recognises vulnerability and interdependence as foundational to human flourishing rather than impediments to productivity.
Food for thought,
Aidan
c.f. Matthew, W. (2018). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner. ↩︎
Rifkin, M. (2017). Beyond settler time: Temporal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. Duke University Press. ↩︎
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books. ↩︎
Althusser, L. (1976). Positions (1964-1975): Freud et Lcan, la philodphie comme arme de la révolution. Éditions sociales. (no, I didn’t read this in French, I just couldn’t find my reference for the English translation) ↩︎
Jameson, F. (2005). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke Univ. Press. (yes, we’ve been calling it late capitalism since as early as 1991) ↩︎
Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press. (strongly recommend) ↩︎
https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf ↩︎
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press. ↩︎