Postcolonialism In Australia

[Rosham Rosebure]

Amovement determined to decolonise the institutional structures and physical space in Oxford and beyond. We seek to challenge the structures of knowledge production that continue to mould a colonial mindset that dominates our present.

Disengagement from empire in the 20th century by countries, such as Great Britain, was coupled with the emergence of nationalist movements and the language of liberation in countries that were former colonial territories.

Both the concept and the celebration of Australia Day have long been markedly controversial amongst decolonisation activists. Opposition to commemorating Australia Day focuses on the forms of injustices believed to flow from the actions of a conquering, colonising power that arrogated to itself sovereignty over a conquered territory.

However, in the view of such critics, it is appropriate neither to observe the day itself nor to celebrate the existence, achievements, and liberties of the nation of Australia. They argue that the legacy of the past negates both the reality of the present and hopes for the future.

Scepticism about the possibility of objective truth, and insistence that knowledge is legitimised by forms of linguistic discourse, give rise to a profound paradox lying at the heart of applied postmodernism. The paradox is that, while asserting the objective truth of the proposition that knowledge is socially constructed, Critical Theory (upon which the critique offered by Postcolonial Theory is based) is unable to justify that the assertion is, itself, objectively true.

As discussed in the mid-2021 CIS paper, Cancelling the Culture: Critical Theory and the Chasm of Incoherence, applied postmodernism asserts with absolute certainty that knowledge is socially constructed and that power hierarchies are oppressive. Power hierarchies must therefore be challenged by changing the language with which they are described, thus changing the knowledge.

If the term post-colonial implies that the nation has undergone decolonisation, and the previously occupied group of people are no longer subjugated to control and limited agency, then Australia is realistically quite far from that objective. While the progressions made throughout Indigenous history have restored many rights to Aborigines, particularly in the way of land rights and social and political activism, the Indigenous voice is still lacking in many discussions nation-wide.

Restructuring education from a postcolonial perspective will not change the hegemony of international capitalism and the harm that it does to cultural, social and physical environments. But it might help people to build the cultural strength to challenge and tackle these problems.

Postcolonial theorists arm themselves with these two principles and set out upon a new and radically sceptical, revisionist way of thinking about the past. In doing so, they eschew the notion of objective, empirical truth, and insist that knowledge is conditioned by power, especially power as exercised through the use of language.

Historical revisionism leads postcolonial theorists to pursue a series of political objectives while dismissing the need for any of those objectives to be warranted from the weighing of empirical evidence. As asserted by Dalia Gebrial, a postcolonial theorist using language characteristic of postcolonial analyses of history:

Therefore, a contemporary issue, both pressing and moral, is the extent to which citizens of a country should assume responsibility for wrongs perpetrated by their state, whether those wrongs were committed in the recent or distant past.

There are significant social psychological barriers caused by internalised social norms as well as socio-historical context and interaction to achieving the kind of reconciliation that settler/indigenous alienation would seem to demand, and that actions such as those outlined above aspire towards.

A determination to avoid repetition of those wrongs may be thought to depend, in part, upon sincere public expressions of apology and remorse. However, repeated public expressions of apology, alone, do little to address existing social and economic hardship endured by some indigenous Australians, especially those living in remote communities. Apologising for the past is morally vacuous if it does no more than attack the historical record while leaving untouched injustices of today. Nonetheless, postcolonial rage against the past is frequently marked by intense emotion.

Contemporary Australians need to be able to respond effectively to the challenge this emotion presents. They must also weigh the extent to which contemporary citizens of Australia, many of whom came as migrants, can be held responsible for actions perpetrated after settlement in 1788. As historian and lawyer, Jonathan Sumption, has remarked, what has happened has happened:

When we castigate the sins of our forebears as immoral, we are saying, implicitly, that there are some moral principles that are absolute and eternal, not relative and ephemeral, by which men [sic] may justly be condemned in any age.

We have a duty to understand why things happened as they did, but apologising for them or trying to efface them is morally worthless. It gets in the way of understanding. Once the relevant actors have left the scene, there is no longer a live moral issue. For those left behind, there are only lessons to be learned.

If Sumption is correct, attempts in 21st century Australia to efface wrongs perpetrated in the early days of colonial settlement are surely a morally worthless bid to discharge a burden of guilt that can never be discharged. The relevant actors have long left the scene. But is the burden of guilt different in circumstances in which the relevant actors have not left the scene and may still be lurking in the wings?

Jaspers drew a distinction between collective guilt, which imputes blame without regard to the actions or intentions of individual citizens, and collective responsibility, which arises from the duties accompanying citizenship. In this sense, responsibility cannot be evaded even though guilt may not be attributable.

i. Criminal guilt: this is attributable to those who violate the law and who have been convicted by a court with legitimate jurisdiction. Criminal guilt is not collective but attaches to the individual criminally convicted.

ii. Political guilt: this belongs to all citizens of a state who must bear equal responsibility for the way in which they are governed. Political guilt is collective in that all citizens of the state are unavoidably liable for the kind of state they create.

iii. Moral guilt: this identifies the personal responsibility a person bears in their own conscience for their action or inaction. Moral guilt arises in the individual who has the capacity both for self-examination and repentance for actions done or left unperformed by virtue of personal choice.

Jaspers attempted to differentiate those situations in which an entire people can be judged from those in which only an individual alone can be judged. Even when all citizens of a country can be held liable for actions taken by the state, Jaspers is adamant that their liability is definite and limited even though it can extend to those who opposed the state and its actions.

However, he is equally clear that all human activity, all human life, happens within groups, communities, and societies. Our existence within those communities requires choice, action, and inaction, and these behaviours can lead, in turn, to individuals being implicated in the actions of others.

This common existence will also implicate individuals in the consequences of those actions (even when they choose not to act) and, therefore, in a guilt that would not otherwise be theirs. It is because of the interconnectedness of human society that the notion of collective guilt arises.

The burden of guilt lies like a heavy yoke across the shoulders. And, as political scientist, Andrew Schaap, has remarked, guilty subjects make poor citizens because their individual experience inhibits their capacity to participate in the society to which they belong:

In contexts such as post-war Germany or post-apartheid South Africa, the kind of metaphysical, or collective, guilt identified by Jaspers can contribute to the emergence of a new, civic commitment on the part of all citizens to build a new society.

In the case of slavery, by contrast, something neither practised nor endorsed in any modern contemporary society, guilt is wrongly attributed to the citizens of Western liberal democracies. This is because Postcolonial Theory conflates guilt with responsibility and fails to distinguish them from one another. Those Western countries that engaged with slavery did profit from it as a commercial practice, but they also committed long ago to its abolition.

Britain abolished slavery in the early 19th century. From 1833, the British Royal Navy fought against slavery both within the territories of its own Empire and beyond. There is nobody alive today to whom guilt or responsibility for that historic slave trade can be attributed because nobody alive today was involved with it. But Postcolonial Theory assumes guilt, and accordingly attributes responsibility. It thereby devalues both.

Even though the charge of slavery has frequently been levelled at Australia for its imported, indentured labour, no instance of the use of such labour falls within internationally accepted definitions of slavery. The efforts of postcolonial activists who focus on such historical figures as Cecil Rhodes would bear greater moral worth if they were directed to those countries where slavery continues to be practised, a point made emphatically by historian David Daintree:

Historically, slavery has been an almost universal practice and one extremely difficult to eradicate. In the matter of slavery, what nation has clean hands? Horrifyingly, UN agencies estimate that there are still 40 million slaves in the world today, three times as many as were transported from Africa to the New World in the infamous Middle Passage.

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