Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Politics of Reconciliation: The Constituent Power of the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia

Abstract

As a reoccupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972 demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992 Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.

Politics through a Web: Citizenship and Community Unbound

“…Our intervention does not seek to affirm or deny the ontological supposition that an unnameable or unknowable dimension serves both as a condition of possibility for change and as a constitutive dimension of social and spatial order (Hetherington and Lee, 2000). We neither interpret Muldoon and Schaap's (2012) paper as one in which they colonise the nonrelational, nor do we want to suggest that an analysis which re-presents a constituted absence is necessarily sufficient as a critical intervention in and of itself. Rather, we want to suggest with Balibar, as well as with Muldoon and Schaap, that an analysis that exposes the making absent of subjects is important in bringing to light what a constitutional or representational order denies.…”

“…It also entails a shift from the assumption that there exist clear-cut lines of inclusion and exclusion (or absence and presence) to an analysis that brings to bear the more ambiguous play between practices of inclusion/exclusion and absence/presence. This is precisely what Muldoon and Schaap (2012) seek to unpack when they note the way in which the Aboriginal Embassy depends on``exploiting the ambiguous position of Aboriginal people as both inside and outside the constituted order, as citizens within and without the political community presupposed by the constitutional order'' (page 435, original emphasis). (12) Ours is thus not so much a direct argument with the ontological account of absence or nonrelationality that Hetherington and Lee develop as it is a suggestion that we shift the focus to political questions that emerge when we explore the concrete production of absences through struggle.…”

“…Rather, we want to suggest with Balibar, as well as with Muldoon and Schaap, that an analysis that exposes the making absent of subjects is important in bringing to light what a constitutional or representational order denies. Indeed, those``pushed or left outside representation'' (Balibar, 2012, page 441, original emphasis) might be understood as`re-presented' in Muldoon and Schaap's (2012) paper through an emphasis on the ongoing struggle of Aboriginal people to seek``a register for the conflict beyond its constitutional mediation in order to contest the legitimacy of the state'' (page 539). Paying attention to the gaps of the web is therefore critical, because it indicates that politics cannot be understood only in terms of a quest for inclusion and/or recognition.…”

(Big) Data and the North-in-South: Australia’s Informational Imperialism and Digital Colonialism

“…A thorough consideration of New Zealand is outside the scope of this article but its own data practices as a member of the Five Eyes alliance (Patman and Southgate 2015;Kuehn 2016) and internally as regards the Indigenous Māori people (Morse 2010;Tauri and Porou 2014) would also seem position it as a North-in-South purveyor of 'double' digital colonialism/coloniality -and thus a topic for further research. ii We acknowledge that Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded (see Fredericks 2010;Muldoon and Schaap 2012). iii For the declassified historical documents concerning the UKUSA Agreement see: https://www.nsa.gov/newsfeatures/declassified-documents/ukusa/ iv Agreement between the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia (Goldflam 2008;Heath 2017).…”

From a Culture of Civility to Deliberative Reconciliation in Deeply Divided Societies

“…They consider the idea of reconciliation from the perspective of democratic agonism. This account emphasises the risks linked to reconciliation, when it is meant to sacrifice the acknowledgement of historical injustices for the sake of social unity (Muldoon , 114–15; Schaap , 255; Muldoon and Schaap , 235). Yet, these authors also recognize that grave disagreements about the past pose serious legitimacy problems (Schaap , 256); in such cases some forms of reconciliation might be needed.…”