Inquiry mentality and occasional mourning in the settler colonial carceral

ABSTRACT

The settler state is vested in the incarceration of non-white bodies. Yet, the coincidence of settler states and liberal polities also means a consistent concealment of this carceral system within forms of governmentality that represent it as a system of protection or rehabilitation. Forms of settler governmentality silence subjects of colour within and beyond the borders of the settler state even as they enclose, incarcerate and eliminate the very bodies that would enunciate an objection to the transnational networks of dispossession in which the settler state is imbricated. This article addresses how speech is managed and circumscribed within the operations of settler colonial liberalism, by focusing on such forms of speech as protest and government inquiries. It does so through an analysis of recent practices of incarceration – particularly of refugees in off-shore detention and of Aboriginal people in Australian prisons and youth detention centres – and of the modes of speech that resist them in Australia.

Acknowledgements

As well as benefiting from the feedback of two anonymous referees, this article was improved by some feedback from Juan Marcellus Tauri. Any oversights remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lorenzo Veracini makes this argument in the context of exogenous groups and the Law of Return in the case of Israel: ‘Settler colonial studies and the politics of interpretation: reframing Israel-Palestine’ (Veracini, conference paper supplied by the author, September 2016).

2. It should be noted that in 2016, the law was reformed to the extent that it exempted doctors and nurses from commenting on abuses (Hall 2016).

3. ‘#Light the Night’ (2014).

4. Report on Government Services: Chapter 15, Vol. F. (Commonwealth of Australia 2016); Bringing Them Home. Chapter 21 (Commonwealth of Australia 1997).

5. Griffiths (2011) engages and critiques the trope of Aboriginal death as tragedy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Micaela Sahhar

Micaela Sahhar lectures in the History of Ideas at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne. Her current work focuses on narrative history, the settler-colonial paradigm and modes of resistance in the Israel-Palestinian and Australian contexts.

Michael R. Griffiths

Michael R. Griffiths lectures in English at the University of Wollongong. His first book, The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature is forthcoming from the University of Western Australia Publishing.