The Cunning of Recognition

Abstract

I been panic. I been have to get up. I been have to get up, talk now. ''No. No. You not going to forget them Dreaming. You can't forget. They still there. They still going. They dangerous, that mob. You say, 'No. ' '' -Betty Bilawag, conversation with the author, 1993 INTRODUCTION / Critical Common Sense JUST BE YOURSELFIn his 1958 essay ''Continuity and Change'' anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner reflected on whether the indigenous population of Australia should assimilate into mainstream settler society. Stanner's discussion would probably not surprise those familiar with mid-century public debates on indigenous assimilation in Australia or, for that matter, in the United States, New Zealand, or Canada. But Stanner writes something that we might easily pass over, rushed, as we often are, to get to the point. He states: ''Let us leave aside the question that they may not want to [assimilate], and the possibility-I would myself put it far higher than a possibility-that very determined forces of opposition will appear. Suppose they do not know how to cease to be themselves.'' 1Thirty-five years later, long after Australian state indigenous policy had

Sexual adjudications and queer transpositions

“…The ability to be, or perhaps better said, appear, credible is a carefully managed process. It is similar, in form and substance to the process that Elizabeth Povinelli (2004) has described in regards to multiculturalist narratives.…”

“…Credibility is constituted by the ability to be "recognized" (Povinelli 2004) or "legible" as a sexual subject (Howe 2009). Through this process we are reminded of a central epistemological condition -what Eve Sedgwick (1990) so famously inscribed at the center of western culture -the closet and its mirror.…”

Implementing Indigenous and Western Knowledge Systems (Part 2): “You Have to Take a Backseat” and Abandon the Arrogance of Expertise

“…Coulthard and others (Day, 2001;Povinelli, 2002) have argued that in order to be recognized as Indigenous by the colonial state, Indigenous Peoples must be rendered static and legible in ways "that [do] not throw into question the background legal, political, and economic framework of the colonial relationship itself" (Coulthard, 2007, p. 451). The result is a Western ontology of Indigeneity (Hunt, 2014).…”

Being Indigenous in the Bureaucracy: Narratives of Work and Exit

“…These kinds of depictions are similarly common in discussions relating to Indigenous people. Povinelli (2002) and Kowal (2015), for example, have both penned evocative and sophisticated investigations of late-liberal multicultural nation-states, such as Australia, and the profound impasses and unresolved tensions they have experienced in engaging meaningfully, positively, and equitably with the cultural difference and even "alterity" of their Indigenous populations. At the same time, these analyses often juxtapose Indigenous Peoples with state administrators and the state's implicit endorsement and elevation of non-Indigenous "normative publics.…”