Unsettling Reflections

I bring to my work a “relational racial consciousness” that motivates my commitment to reading power and its myriad manifestations through my research, pedagogy, and practice. This connects to my deep investment in citation practices and in centering the scholarship and contributions of Indigenous scholars, scholars of color, and those otherwise excluded or diminished from the limited canonical visions of what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge within the academy.

Importantly, this commitment also extends to a continuous, ongoing confrontation with my own research practices and knowledge production, as a non-Indigenous racialised settler scholar researching Indigenous histories and contemporary realities, as always already entangled with structures of dispossession and violence. As such, this forecloses any possibility of my research assuming any mastery or claims to authoritative knowledge and establishes my interpretations as inescapably partial, provisional, and contingent—hardly a reflection on Indigenous truths but a necessary grappling with the settler colonial logics and frameworks to which my ‘knowing’ is fundamentally bound.

At the same time as a racialised subject embedded in her own histories of colonial violence, I take this fundamental unknowability as a transformative subversive learning that seeks to disrupt colonial certainty and authority. This also means “hold[ing] two truths in cacophonous balance”, acknowledging that the very existence of so-called Australia—the lands on which I live and work—relies on the historical and ongoing violent dispossessions of Indigenous peoples, while also conceding that the pursuit of the possibilities of capital accumulation by the Australian settler colony were fundamentally tied to the imperial jurisdictions of the British empire, the latter sustained and aggrandized by violent economies of wealth extraction across its colonial administrations in India and elsewhere. These distinct yet connected paradigms of violence, of settlement and colonial relations of production, form part of what Lisa Lowe names the “intimacies of four continents”, constituting a “settler imperial imaginary, which continues to be elaborated today, casting differentiated peoples across the globe in relation to liberal ideas of civilization and human freedom”, ideas that continue to operate as myths to further “subjugate enslaved, indigenous, and colonized peoples, and to obscure the violence of both their separations and their mixtures”.

Although Lowe’s designation appears to overlook the fifth continent and taking note of Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s critique of Lowe’s figuration where “the native peoples of the Americas are collapsed into slavery”, the settler imperial imaginary no doubt extends to and persists in so-called Australia, where orbits of differently colonised peoples traverse in overlapping disjointed ways on stolen lands.

Importantly, I note that these intimacies do not amount to a commensurable relation, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Koenpul, Quandamooka First Nation) contends, Indigenous peoples’ “ontological relation to land constitutes a subject position that we do not share, and which cannot be shared, with the postcolonial subject whose sense of belonging in this place is tied to migrancy”. Indeed, as Moreton-Robinson goes on to say, my very ability to ‘legally’ belong “is tied to the fiction of Terra Nullius and the logic of capital…sanctioned by the law that enabled dispossession”.

Moreover, careful attention to the multivalent, cacophonies of power also means recognising the violences of the current dealings of an increasingly despotic Indian state and the historical and contemporary manifestations of its own oppressive hierarchies of caste, religion, and class. Here, I am inextricably bound to those systemic, institutional, and social exclusions that consolidate my status as caste privileged even as they seek to continually marginalise and persecute Dalit, Muslim, and Indigenous communities.

The (im)balance of these intersecting oppressions and privileges is one that can only be held (if held at all) in discomfort, a continuous grappling and reckoning with the fundamental instability of identity, tenuously tethered to the shifting weights of irreducible violences, both those endured and those perpetuated. Crucially, I am careful also to note that this discomfort is necessarily irresolvable and unsettling and not in service of what Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and Wayne Yang caution as a “settler move to innocence” but one that can only truthfully be guided by an “ethic of incommensurability” that recognises that “the opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common”. This entails a complete divestment from settler futurity, what Tuck and Yang emphasise involves “repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole”. Importantly, they insist that “decolonial struggles here/there are not parallel, not shared equally, nor do they bring neat closure to the concerns of all involved - particularly not for settlers”. Still, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, demands a coalescing of struggles to “build constellations of co-resistance” that not only push back against death inflicting oppressive states but also empower us to draw breath from a collective reimagination that can create possibilities for pathways out of settler colonialism.

A through line through all of this is a commitment to leaning into more accountable relations, to writing tentatively and with humility, to insisting on “an uncompromising diagnosis of the deathly apparatuses of power”, and to seeking reparations beyond the textual encounter.

In thinking about cyber systems and technology more broadly, I emphasise the importance of both recognising the latent violences of digital and cyber technologies as entrenching broader regimes of settler authority while also acknowledging their role in enabling “a universal discourse where a transnational language of anticolonial struggle has come to inform local Indigenous self-determination and resistance paths”. My research thus explores both the persisting logics of violence embedded in settler fabrications of technology as well as their radical capacities for enabling and furthering Indigenous resistance, resurgence, and futurity. By looking at the tensions, possibilities, and investments in these technologies I hope to illuminate their contesting dynamics that make possible specific dissolutions and consolidations of power that suspend settler authority and invigorate Indigenous survivance.