Missing in action

This essay weaves itself around the figure of the hip-hop artist M.I.A. Its driving questions are about the impossible choices and willed identifications of a dirty war and the forms of media, cultural politics and creativity they engender; their inescapable traces and unaccountable hauntings and returns in diasporic lives. In particular, the essay focuses on M.I.A.’s practice of an embodied poetics that expresses the contradictory affective and political investments, shifting positionalities and conflicting solidarities of diaspora lives enmeshed in war

Burning our Boats

‘At the unstable point where the 'unspeakable' stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture . . .’ Stuart Hall (1932-2014). The burning of boats, that classic figure for the impossibility of return, was, for over a decade a practice routinely staged by the Australian state as a form of ‘deterrence’ against other unwanted entrants – even as it served, for those just landed, to confirm the finality of their arrival. More recently, this official “torching rite” of no return meets its counterpart in the bizarre logic of the “orange lifeboat,” where asylum seekers are forcibly turned back to an uncertain fate aboard unsinkable, air-conditioned capsules. This paper considers questions of arrival, departure and refugee and diasporic subjectivities in the context of Australian refugee policy. Some readers may notice in my subtitle an allusion to V.S. Naipaul’s memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, but more immediate to my concerns is Amitav Ghosh’s articulation of a distinction between exodus and dispersal narratives. Whereas narratives of exodus fix their gaze on the shore of arrival, Ghosh suggests, dispersal compels a return to the pain of rupture and the movement of departure: the sting of smoke evermore in our eyes from our burning possessions; before us, the steady flaming of our boats. Marking Stuart Hall’s indispensable theorizing of diasporic subjectivities in the wake of his passing earlier this year, I ask how refugee and disapora bodies and subjects are made and unmade in the context of the Australian borderscape, understood as a set of makeshift, protean geographies of making live and letting die

Visibility, Atrocity and the Subject of Postcolonial Justice

In the context of the 2009 atrocities in Lanka, in this paper I attempt to think through a set of questions about visibility, witness, suffering, accountability and disposability as they are played out in the relations between the necro-geo-politics of global institutions and the patchworks of local and transnational movements that attempt to materialize peoples’ suffering and realize the possibility of justice within fragile and compromised frameworks

Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities of the Nonhuman

The abject or monstrous body of the killed or tortured nonhuman is evoked throughout Pugliese’s State Violence and the Execution of Law and is critical to the series of carceral and genocidal caesurae that the book so incisively maps. This essay tracks a set of iconological/representational and geopolitical/ideological forces as they intersect the trophy body of the tortured or killed non-human. From Indonesia in 1965 to colonial Kenya and the civil war in SriLanka, the essay considers the violent ramifications of the trophybodies of Abu Ghraib and their symbolic, ideological and affective refractions across other spaces, sites, temporalities and bodies, as well as the counter-visibilities, re-mediations and cultural politics to which they give rise

Dgadi-Dugarang: Talk Loud, Talk Strong: A Tribute to Aboriginal leader Uncle Ray Jackson, 1941-2015

In this brief memorial essay, we pay tribute to the late Uncle Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and tireless social justice activist. Uncle Ray Jackson’s social justice work encompassed a broad spectrum of social movements. Throughout his work, he insistently brought into focus critical relations between national and transnational formations of settler-colonial power, between its racist modalities of governance and the lived violence that it produced for its targeted subjects, including Indigenous peoples, refugees and asylum seekers and other ‘suspect’ peoples and racial undesirables. We also mark one of Uncle Ray Jackson’s most significant contributions to the ongoing assertion of unceded Aboriginal sovereignty in the context of the Australian settler-colonial state: his establishment of a number of Aboriginal Passport Ceremonies. We discuss the political significance of these ceremonies for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples

Reading Lesson

a memoir /short stor

Smoke, curtains and mirrors: the production of race through time and title registration

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race