Whiteness, Power, and Decolonial Imaginaries in Settler Australia: The Future Hopes of a Southern Approach

In the emergent decolonial turn, global protests animated by decolonial fervor trail the successes of Indigenous social movements, while in Australia a shifting decolonial space marks both possibility and risk, underscoring the importance of further examining Whiteness, non-Indigeneity, and the Australian social body. This literature-based chapter focuses the anthropological gaze primarily on the White subject. The chapter draws from multiple sources, including a reflexively informed process which springs from discussions in place with the author’s late colleague, Philip Snr, an Australian First Nations Elder for whom the decolonization of ancestral lands was an essential commitment. In review of an Australian scholarship of critical Whiteness, this chapter argues there is a lack of knowledge on the meaning and significance of decolonial goals to White Australian identity. This dearth is symptomatic of the erasures that dovetail with the White subject’s ejection from analysis and that compound multiple power imbalances to reach deep into the heart of the settler state. This chapter leans on the colonial matrix of power (CTP) as lens, deriving much of its analytic and diagnostic strength from the critical literatures from Abya Yala, the name for the Americas used by many of its Indigenous movements to reflect First Peoples perspectives. In this way, the chapter brings the Australian context into dialogue with other decolonial centers. Drawing also from Michael Rothberg and Judith Butler, whose respective intellectual work unveils the impotence of human rights landscapes, this chapter indicates possibilities for interventions that can increase solidarity without becoming trapped in binary essentialisms. The chapter calls for closer critical engagement with a Southern decoloniality scholarship to understand something about the dynamic relationship between White subjectivity and the productive meaning-making processes of decolonial practice.