Thanks for attending!

Dear attendees,

Thank you for tuning in to the final webinar of our 2022 series, Critical Public Conversations: Undoing Australia. This webinar titled ‘Settler Memory and the Pitfalls and Possibilities of a Third Reconstruction’ featured Babson College academic and author Kevin Bruyneel discussing his book, Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States.

75 people joined over zoom, with a lively engagement during the Q&A session.

Themes raised

• Professor Bruyneel discussed the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself.
• The talk centred on an important era and text - the late 19th Century Reconstruction Era in the United States and W.E.B. Du Bois’ canonical text Black Reconstruction in America – and in so doing discusses the role of the political memory of reconstruction in US politics today.
• Professor Bruyneel speaks to the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity and its relationship to anti-racist and anti-capitalist critiques and effort to imagine and build a better world
• He discussed how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism.

Some questions from the audience

• The memory of the Reconstruction era is deeply tied to the politics of US constitutionalism. Legal scholars debate the extent to when the Reconstruction redeemed the Constitution; your account, as well as many others’, trouble this. Could you speak to the relationship between constitutional memory and promise on one hand, and decolonization on the other? Do you see possibilities for constitutional “redemption” as a result of this decolonial memory of the Reconstruction? If drawing on other legal authorities can be an act of sovereignty as you say, is there the risk that opening up to Indigenous laws will be used to reinforce, rather than challenge, the legitimacy of the settler state law? 
• How would you connect the land/property distinction which you’ve drawn attention to in du Bois to concepts of sovereignty which I think of as central to decolonisation.
• What I see at the moment are many non-performatives that turn ‘decolonisation’ and ‘abolition’ into empty signifiers. But acting collectively to return land, beyond the scant individual actions that exist and should be commended, cannot be said to exist here. We can use the ideas raised by your talk to think about alliance building between Indigenous people and other peoples who are here for various reasons that are not really based on choice.  But when it comes to white colonisers, should we not at least be talking about what a politics of self-dispossession would look like?

This webinar series will return in March 2023. Next year’s Critical Public Conversations theme will be Country, Climate and Colonialism.

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The Australian Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples (Parkville, Southbank, Werribee and Burnley campuses), The Yorta Yorta Nation (Shepparton and Dookie campuses) and The Dja Dja Wurrung people (Creswick campus) stand and respectfully recognises Elders past and present. Based on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne which sits on sovereign Wurundjeri lands, we at the Australian Centre are conscious we have obligations to this place and its people. We are also conscious that the University has not always valued this relationship and indeed still has a long way to go.