Lisa Slater

Settler colonialism attempts to make invisible the labours of care that Indigenous peoples have been doing for millennia. Notably, the imposition of settler colonial ontologies-epistemologies disrupt and compromise Indigenous people’s obligations to land and ancestors (Kwaymullina, Ambelin. 2020. Living on Stolen Land. Broome: Magabala Books, 7). Kim Tallbear calls upon settler scholars to think more expansively about what counts as the benefits and risks of research (2014. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10 (2): 1–7. http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371, 2). She asks settler scholars to learn to ‘stand with’ a community and be willing to be altered and revise one’s stake in knowledge production (Tallbear, Kim. 2014. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10 (2): 1–7. http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371, 2). What does my feminist ethics of care, which strives to unsettle my settler colonial logic of knowledge production, look like? To respond, I will reflect upon a collaborative cultural revitalisation project with Wolgalu and Wiradjuri First Nations community in Brungle-Tumut (New South Wales, Australia). The social world I am imbedded in is different from that of Wolgalu/Wiradjuri colleagues. How is meaning negotiated in the encounter between settler colonial and Aboriginal practices of care and knowledge production? It’s a methodological conundrum, which requires thinking with care. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa conceptualises thinking with care as a thick, non-innocent obligation of living in interdependent worlds (2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19). I want to practice non-innocent care.

My purpose is to consider the role that uncertainty might play in reimagining political responsibility in Australia. There is a growing body of scholarship that is re-examining what it might mean to be settler colonial and politically responsible. It urges settlers to not only comprehend their complicity in structures of violence and oppression – colonialism, environmental degradation, racial inequality, for example – but more so, to know how they are constituted by the racial logic of settler colonialism. In a sense, it is asking progressive settlers not to turn away from the uneven distribution of suffering, trauma and vulnerability towards the ease, certainty and satisfaction of much good white politics. I want to reflect upon how fundamental certainty is to the reproduction of settler colonialism. Or more so, the refusal of uncertainty, which is a denial of being implicated and the limitations of one’s knowingness. To do so, I bring critical Indigenous studies and settler colonialism into conversation with studies of emotion and affect. If the white settler emotional economy stymies anti-racism – innocence, fragility, anxiety – then emotions are a site for ethical and political action. Doubt and uncertainty don’t feel good, but they tell of other political possibilities, and ways to reform responsibility.

The focus of this essay is the racialised political emotions of ‘good white people’. I examine what Berlant names ‘public feelings’, focusing on the way emotional states are part of communal experiences. My interest is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ repeated calls for mainstream Australia to genuinely engage with political and cultural difference, and listen. Such claims often make ‘good white people’ anxious. They protest, insist they are trying but don’t know what to do. Good white people’s anxiety is much more telling than the stories that are told about bad racists. Thus, it is a productive site to analyse the cultural dynamics of settler–Indigenous relations, and to understand how race structures Australian culture and the endurance of racism.

This book analyses the anxiety "well-intentioned" settler Australian women experience when engaging with Indigenous politics. Drawing upon cultural theory and studies of affect and emotion, Slater argues that settler anxiety is an historical subjectivity which shapes perception and senses of belonging. Why does Indigenous political will continue to provoke and disturb? How does settler anxiety inform public opinion and "solutions" to Indigenous inequality? In its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of settler colonialism, emotions and ethical belonging, Anxieties of Belonging has far-reaching implications for understanding Indigenous-settler relations.

To borrow from Irene Watson, this is a meditation on discomfort (2007). I begin at a cultural tourism site in northeast Arnhem Land, where Yolηu women were teaching Napaki (non-Indigenous) women about their kinship systems and responsibilities. The tourists were eager to learn: at times insistent and demanding. There was something too familiar about the scene: the settler women’s clawing desire for ‘Aboriginal culture’, only just keeping at bay the anxiety evoked by Aboriginal autonomy and political will. My concern is that in this historical moment there is a retreat, a wariness to disclose what it feels like to be the beneficiaries of living in a colonised country. It is shaming to discuss these awkward, if not ugly, emotions, and much easier to dismiss these as personal failings, sweep them aside, or to hide behind empathy for so-called vulnerable people or an enthusiasm for ‘culture’. Consequently those committed to social justice could fail to understand contemporary Australia, and also disregard an alternative feminist political practice. In this article, I reflect upon what might enable ‘good white people’ to stay in places of discomfort and be responsive and answerable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people [Watson, Irene. 2007. “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities.” In Our Patch, edited by Suvendrini Perera, 23–44. Curtin, WA: Network Books].

A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott - June 2016