''Heart, Power, Treaty, Truth: Affective, Political Performances in (post) Reconciliation Australia' - Trevor Reese Memorial Lecture in Australian History Menzies Centre Kings College London 2017.pdf (original) (raw)
'Heart, Power, Treaty, Truth: Affective, Political Performances in (post) Reconciliation Australia' October 4th, 2017 Penny Edmonds The Trevor Reese Memorial Lecture was delivered on 4 October 2017 on the Strand Campus, King’s College London. The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, delivered by the First Nations National Constitutional Convention to the Australian nation in May, 2017, placed matters of history and truth telling, Aboriginal sovereignty, and treaty (Makarrata) at the very forefront of agreement making and constitutional change. The Uluru statement from the heart of the country invoked the potent politics of heart, and can be understood as part of a long lineage or repertoire of political and affective Indigenous/settler invocations for peace building and agreement-making in settler colonies that have been shaped by violence and dispossession, and can be located within a global a paradigm of reconciliation and redress. This lecture explores the way that such reconciliation performances, however fraught, have sought transition to a new moral order and may be understood as critical rites of passage in settler societies, working towards an imagined refounding of nation. Importantly, in search of a new emancipatory politics, the paper considers Indigenous-led refutations or reworkings of the consensus politics of reconciliation in Australia’s public culture, where state based rituals may falter. Taking account of the cultural politics of emotion, truth telling, and embodied performance in pressing matters of history, the paper shows how these Indigenous led performances are risky and often experimental border-crossings that offer us glimpses of new postcolonial futures. Includes a postscript on the Government's rejection of the Statement from Heart in late October 2017. I wish to dedicate this lecture to my colleague and dear friend Associate Professor Tracey Banivanua Mar, of La Trobe University, Melbourne, who passed away in Australia this year. Many of us have learned so much from Tracey’s critical insights. Brilliant, passionate and steadfast in her politics, Tracey has gifted us with activist, emancipatory scholarship of the highest calibre. She was a shining star of Australian, Pacific and Indigenous histories, and an intellectual leader to whom so many of us have looked.