[csaa-forum] Thinking Race and Identity Conference Review

[Danny Butt]

Thinking Race and Identity (Conference Review)

University of New South Wales, Sydney 31 July 2004

Danny Butt <db at dannybutt.net>

This conference was billed as "a forum for people interested or working in
the area of contemporary French philosophy to discuss concepts of race and
identity", and despite not having any particular interest in French
philosophy I had a great time and learnt a lot. Fanon had been creeping up
my "must revisit" list recently so this conference seemed like a good
opportunity to move toward that. Particular congratulations should go to the
organisers - Danielle Davis (UNSW), Joshua Mullan (Macquarie) and Mark
O'Neill (UNSW), all philosophy postgrads, for a programme that brought in a
much more diverse audience (60ish? people) than you'd expect from a French
philosophy conference! Undoubtedly the cheap registration (esp for unwaged
people) was another contributing factor. These notes are a mixture of notes
made during the day and reflections on some of the speakers/issues and are
likely to contain many inaccuracies, so I'd appreciate any corrections /
responses and you should take these representations with plenty of salt.
Also apologies to anyone whose work I misrepresent here!

The day began with Marcia Langton and this was the second time I've heard
her speak, and once again she would have to rate among my favourite
conference speakers, with a passionate mixture of policy analysis, what I
would call pragmatic theoretical reflection (though Langton prefaced this
talk with "I'm not going to talk about theory"), historiography and personal
experience. One of the most useful themes I find in Langton's work is the
consistent move away from abstractions in Aboriginal issues and through to
specific situations, highlighting the experiential aspects of identity and
reformulating many issues as simply about the white left's lack of
preparedness to engage with indigenous people's experiences. However, these
experiences are always located in the particular historical construction of
the fundamentally (and constitutionally) racist Australian nation-state. One
particular story I found enlightening was her linking of the legal status of
Aboriginal people at Australian Federation to the distribution of Federal
government financial support between Eastern and Western Australia. If
Aboriginal people had been counted as citizens, South Australia and Western
Australia would have had to be given more money than the eastern centres of
colonial occupation. Couldn't have that! Langton was also consistent in her
linking of contemporary indigenous experience to larger media power
dynamics, describing Redfern as "the Iraq in your backyard", one whose
day-to-day reality is mediated and marketed by the white media as a symbol
for race relations, and so anything which doesn't fit the story gets thrown
out. Prof Langton is one of the real treasures of Australian public life and
I'd encourage anyone interested in contemporary Australian issues and/or
colonisation to hear her speak.

The next session was over to French philosophy. Danielle Davis began with a
discussion of the black body as performed in the recent death of Redfern
teenager TJ Hickey as he was chased by police. Drawing from Fanon and
Merlau-Ponty, Davis outlined the various kinds of relations possible between
white and black bodies, placed TJ's pursuit in the context of a larger
history/paradigm of black pursuit by white cops, and argued for a
reformulation of these relationships that (I think?) rested on a way of
physically relating in terms of openness, a turning toward, an acceptance of
being in the same physical space in a mutually productive way. It reminded
me of a great piece of stand-up from one of the Original Kings of Comedy,
about the way white people move when they "walk along the street catch a bit
of blackness in their periphery... They're walking along nervously, I move
to the left to walk by but the guy's also moved to the left to try and let
me pass on the right, so I change tack but he's freaked out and quickly
darts to the right blocking my way again... so in the end I had to rob him."
A suggestive paper even if I was a little troubled at the use of what is
obviously a tragic and still-raw situation in service of a slightly
abstracted discussion of bodily relations. Then again I don't work in
philosophy so maybe that's just the nature of the discipline. The feeling
was clarified by a question from the floor that asked whether Hickey's
distance from his own people's support networks (my understanding was that
few if any of his extended family lived in Redfern) may have played a role
in his vulnerable position with the police. That seemed like a very clear
question to ask from an Aboriginal cultural viewpoint that Davis did not
seem to be able to account for within the framework proposed in her paper.

The other two papers in this panel were from white philosophers, and both of
them were useful for exemplifying in different ways the perils of applying
European academic speaking positions in relation to indigenous issues. Ros
Diprose (UNSW) gave a reading of a passage from Ivan Sen's excellent film
"Beneath Clouds" [the scene where the older Aboriginal woman asks the
white-identifying but possibly Aboriginal Lena "Where your people from
girl?"] to discuss the importance of a place-bound model of community for
Australia. Jean-Phillipe Deranty (Macquarie) gave a reading of "Blacklines -
contemporary critical theory by Indigenous Australians", in which he
proposed to" give up a position of power" and relate what he'd learnt from
this book as a French philosopher.

I've recently discussed elsewhere the usefulness of Spivak's suggestion that
"who speaks is less important than who will listen", and the immediate
consequence of that question in terms of this audience who were present is
"what do these presentations offer an Indigenous audience"? Not much judging
by the response from the floor, where questions emerged about the usefulness
of a generic discussion of "community" for Aboriginal peoples, given their
highly complex and culturally specific ways of managing relationships. Both
speakers were careful to situate their papers in the non-indigenous space,
but at this stage I'm just about ready to put the statement "I'm not
speaking for Aboriginal people" in roughly the same category as "Some of my
best friends are..." You know it's going to be followed by some kind of
generalisation that the speaker feels the need to qualify, and is therefore
likely to be dodgy. Diprose and Deranty's papers weren't "bad", and may have
passed without comment at the usual white-dominated humanities conferences,
but if we're looking for some practical reconciliation I think it has to
happen in our methods of communication more than the content we choose to
study - i.e. we need to get past the space where white people talk to each
other about Aboriginal issues using European theoretical terminology that
excludes Aboriginal conceptions of the same phenomena.

A notable methodological contrast could be seen in the paper by Faye
Brinsmead, a legal scholar who, without any performed anxieties around
representation, gave a detailed and practical re-evaluation of the judgement
by Justice Blackburn in 1971 that asserted that indigenous people have no
property rights. Brinsmead's contention - if I recall correctly - was that
while Blackburn's conclusion was decried as racist, the judgement itself
contains a wide survey of commonwealth approaches to indigenous property
rights, and performs an unintentional deconstruction of legal approaches to
indigenous ownership that posits a "right of occupancy" rather than a
"freehold property right." If this occupancy-based approach was elaborated
upon it could have far-reaching consequences that would dwarf Australia's
Mabo judgement, in that the right of occupancy may not have been
extinguished by *any* state allocation of freehold property, and this would
bring about a much-needed legal discussion about the incommensurability of
these conceptions of property. It could possibly move beyond the dynamic
Michael Mansell observed, where "the court gives an inch but takes another
mile". [Note: I've only recently familiarised myself with the legal
dialogues on native title and I could have this argument totally wrong, but
what was important was that everyone I talked to thought it was a great
paper.]

Brinsmead followed Irene Watson (Flinders) on this panel, whose paper I
mostly missed due to being caught up outside talking, but which seemed to be
trying to reclaim the revolutionary aspirations of Fanon from the tamer
academic recuperations we've become used to. She reminded us of Fanon's
contention that the end point of the colonial dynamic would be the "wrecking
of colonial space", and a destruction of this space, rather than any
synthesis that might be hoped for among liberal white culture.

Rounding out the panel was Paul Patton (UNSW), who moved from his advertised
title on "Indigenous Rights" to a discussion of difference in relation to
Government-Indigenous relationships in Australia. I must admit to not being
as familiar with Patton's work as I should be, as I've probably just read
the wrong things and not felt like pursuing his work. On the other hand,
I've found Patton inspirational as a white Australian philosopher
consistently returning to race issues, and facilitating interdisciplinary
and intercultural relationships in the intellectual community in innovative
ways. I'll probably check out more of Patton's work after this conference's
paper, because it was great. Patton performed a very clear exposition of
Australia's "pathological attachment to equality", which is routinely
mouthed by Prime Minister Howard and co despite the very obvious
inequalities which continue to exist and be fostered by colonial government
practices. While we tend to think of ourselves as moving forward on
"reconciliation", the previous ten years in Australia has seen a
semi-dismantling of Native Title, no real process on native rights
generally, and the disbanding of ATSIC, and its functions reabsorbed into
"mainstream" government departments. What's gone wrong? Patton outlined the
lack of a public language for contemporary "differential rights", even if
this is seeking to restore "equality" by reversing the racist differential
rights that have built the Australian nation-state. This lack of a public
language allows Howard to say the most outrageous stuff like "We can't have
a Treaty with our own people, so a Treaty would deny Aboriginal people
citizenship." Patton called for academic and public intellectual work that
elaborates on "terra nullius" and includes the depths of its racism and its
role in contemporary interpretations of race relations.

Before the panel just discussed, Australian Senator Aden Ridgeway gave
probably the best conference presentation by a politician that I've seen (I
realise that may not be saying much, but it was great). He talked candidly
about negotiating his responsibilities to government, to his community, and
(as the only Aboriginal member of parliament) to Aboriginal people
generally. His personal story as a high-school dropout from North Coast NSW,
moving to becoming a welder then community activist and politician provided
no shortage of vivid anecdotes to support his view that Australia's failure
to accept Aboriginal people as fully human is a loss to the entire country.
Ridgeway also discussed the Australian perversion of the word "egalitarian"
to generate some "plausible deniability" about the "real trauma behind the
statistics in Aboriginal communities." He finished with a call for greater
investment in Indigenous languages, noting that "we spend more money on
teaching French than we do teaching Aboriginal languages", and highlighted
the benefits of mainstreaming Aboriginal-controlled service provision in the
outback - "the Miramar model" - where e.g. Indigenous health services
treated Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

The keynote address came from Lewis Gordon, professor of philosophy at
Temple University and author of a number of books on Fanon and African
philosophy that I have to check out after his address! His paper "The Human
in the Question of Race: A Philosophical Portrait" gave an expansive
overview of the issue of race in philosophy. Gordon has a Barthesian style
with a gift for "summing up" ("There are six kinds of decadence in
philosophy..." "three approaches to racial domination..." "two options..."
etc.) - my notes at the end of his paper read like a fully indented lecture
outline. But his direct style in no way trivialised the complexity of the
issues of race in philosophy, carefully distinguishing between the different
logics of race discourses around colour (anxiety over "exponentiality") and
indigeneity (belief that indigenous people will disappear); or philosophical
exclusion based on epistemic closure (removing oneself from engaging with
questions) or "bad faith" (removing oneself from engaging with evidence).
Gordon also brought his own experiences into the frame, describing an
editorial in a former employers' University Newspaper raising questions
about the "proliferation of black faculty" on campus. It turned out that
there were 9 out of 2200 black faculty members, but it was Lewis choosing to
walk across the campus each day to his classes that had provoked a moral
panic.

One of Gordon's key points, drawing from Fanon's dialectics of recognition,
was to suggest that all kinds of racist assumptions have a simple form:
"Tell me why you have the right to exist." The object of the assumption then
has to "use external things to justify yourself.... But the moment you're
caught seeking recognition by using these external things you've already
lost." The only real strategy is to find ways of inverting the assumption,
in DuBois's formulation to stop being the problem, but occupy the space of
identifying problems. Because the racist logic is about the elimination of
"problems", racial others are invariably fighting for the end of the entire
racist world-system (thus revolution/self-determination rather than liberal
assimilation). Gordon also made a number of related points about the perils
of disciplinarity, and the need for a radical study of "movement" among
peoples due to the absence of "voluntary migration." [I think]. Anyway, a
thoroughly entertaining and insightful address that left me with a lot to
think about and follow up.

Finally and importantly, the event had some of the best conference catering
I've encountered. Plenty of vegetarian-vegan options at lunch, bearable
coffee, sparkling mineral water in breaks is a great idea, tasty SE-Asian
styled finger food and good wine/beer/juice selection at cocktails to
finish. A real pleasure not to leave a day's conferencing desperate for some
good food :).

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