Australian racial capitalism, Indigenous exploitation and the racial regime of recognition and reconciliation

Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact

The ‘question of labour’ and its exploitation in the Third World has not been given ample consideration by contemporary international legal scholars in their historical examinations of the making of the international order. This article revisits the history of the interwar institutions of the League of Nations, particularly the International Labour Organization (ILO), to argue that international law reformulated imperialism through its re-articulation of labour relations, beginning with its quest to suppress slavery and ultimately regulate forced labour in Africa. International institutions contributed to the valorization of ‘free wage labour’ in Africa and the Third World through its international ‘native labour’ policies, the development of international labour standards, and especially the passing of the 1930 Forced Labour Convention. The article argues that international institutions safeguarded the processes of capitalist racial/colonial accumulation and labour exploitation by ideologically dis-embedding the violence of slavery and forced labour from ‘free wage labour’, veiling the structural unity and totality of the international legal order with racial capitalism. Drawing on the ‘Black radical/internationalist tradition’, I propose an expansive critique of the international order as a form of ‘enslavement’ to the structures of capitalism, so as to adequately expose international law’s structural embeddedness with labour exploitation, white supremacy, and racial capitalism.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are disproportionately represented in the statutory child protection system in Queensland and across Australia. A strategy gaining traction to address this disproportionate representation is to recruit more Indigenous practitioners into child protection work. However, the experiences of Indigenous people who undertake child protection work have not been explored thoroughly, particularly in an Australian research context. There is a dearth of enquiry considering Indigenous child protection workers' potential experiences of trauma, given past policies of forced child removal in Australia. There has also been a lack of consideration of Indigenous practitioners' professional and wellbeing support needs in the workplace. Additionally, there is a dearth of research examining the link between the additional recruitment of Indigenous practitioners and a decrease in the rate of Indigenous children requiring the services of statutory child protection authorities. Given the unique position of Indigenous people working in child protection and the plans to recruit more Indigenous practitioners into the system, an understanding of their experiences and support needs is imperative. This study relies on the stories of the participants to answer the primary research question: what are the experiences of Indigenous child protection workers? The research design was underpinned by critical theory and decolonisation frameworks. The decolonising theoretical underpinning of the study viewed the participants as the experts in their own experience, which provided a framework for the co-creation of knowledge. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews, the participants and researcher, in collaboration, explored the overall research question guided by three main aims. These aims were to explore the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who work in the child protection field, to explore the effects of historical trauma experienced by Indigenous Australians and its symptomology within a child protection workplace, and to explore participant views of culturally responsive models of support for Indigenous workers within the child protection system. The purposive sample of participants consisted of 13 people who self-identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander and had worked with families in which child protection concerns were present. Interviews were transcribed and a thematic analysis was undertaken to identify emerging themes. The experiences of the research participants tell the story of a deficiency within the child protection system—particularly in a statutory context—to meet the wellbeing needs of Indigenous workers and provide a workplace environment that is culturally safe. Also described were recurrent experiences of racism, a lack of culturally appropriate statutory child protection practice, a culture of bullying and a lack of support that acknowledges the distinctive experience of Indigenous people who undertake child protection work. Strong themes of marginalisation, isolation and oppression emerged consistently from the narratives of participants. The outcome of this study generates a body of knowledge outlining how the primary and intergenerational trauma histories of Indigenous child protection workers may affect their wellbeing at work and continued ability to maintain their presence in the child protection field. The stories of these participants have created context and clarity for non-Indigenous supervisors regarding why the support and supervision needs of Indigenous child protection workers are different to those of non-Indigenous workers, as well as providing information to inform staff support policies and procedures. This study has produced a beginning evidence base for further research in this area.

There has been a large-scale migration of population from Northeastern states to India’s metropolitan cities and other regions in the past two decades under neo-economic policies, blurring the historical disjuncture between the perceived ‘mainland’ and the country’s Northeast. While this demonstrates social and economic mobility, recent literature has shown that such movements have also produced racial discrimination, labour exploitation, hostility and violence against perceived ‘others’ from the Northeast. Building on this literature, the paper explores how race, sexuality and labour intersect in soft skill industries, especially in spa centres, and examines how racial capital and racial capitalism work in complex and paradoxical forms while Northeasterners migrate internally in India. The paper brings forth the nuanced insight that even internal, domestic migration can entail the creation of racial capital, and migrants need not cross national borders for their raciality to be valued differently. By employing concepts of racial capital and racial capitalism side by side, it is shown that while the differentiation is animated through mobility, signifying the intra-Asian diversity, the neo-liberal economy simultaneously racialises the labour field where mobility is confronted by the experience of structured inequalities and everyday forms of violence and suffering.

This special issue seeks to unpack key mechanisms and processes at the intersections of mobilizations around homelessness, excessive policing, evictions, public housing, and vacant building occupations. Three questions drive its contributions: (1) How are the rising tide of housing movements—as well as their repression—around the world (re)shaping urban politics today? (2) What insights have social, urban, and housing movement scholars brought to produce a better understanding of housing under racial capitalism? (3) How does the Black Radical Tradition provide a generative framework for expanding our understanding of housing movements around the world? We build on work that views these processes as systemic and spatial, wherein practices of white supremacist capital accumulation and anti-Black and Indigenous dispossession are embedded and reproduced through individual transactions, such as the purchase and sale of real estate, which are then subsumed into a system of racialized spatialization. In the reproduction of urban space through new iterations of racialization, perceptions of individual outcomes become naturalized as consequences of a colorblind and democratic society that allots success and failure based on individual adherence to the system’s core tenets. We therefore urge housing researchers and organizers to look to the Black Radical Tradition, the role of women tenant organizers, the spatial divergence of the encampment, and the deployment of care as a means of resistance. These frameworks are critical to the remaking of urban space against public and private policies, institutions, and agents who continue to deploy violence to maintain the oppressive structures of commodified housing.

"We Will Show the Country": Bringing History to Life

Recent decades have seen the escalation of debate across western democracies that were once sites of the British Empire about how to remember the history of colonialism. This essay will consider how these debates have manifested in relation to the history of indigenous dispossession and its remembrance in Australia and Canada, which not only share many parallels in their stories of settlement but also in their recent efforts to come to terms with historical injustices against indigenous peoples. In examining how these debates have taken shape in the representation of national history in Australia’s and Canada’s recently established national museums, this essay will question the degree to which public historical consciousness in these former settler societies demonstrates a political imperative to remember historical injustices on the one hand, and on the other hand an enduring desire to forget them in favour of a more unifying story of the nation.

The relationship between migration and Australian capitalism has long been a topic of robust scholarly debate in sociology and economics. Researchers in those fields have highlighted how migration has left an indelible imprint on Australian capitalism. By contrast, Australian migration histories have given scant attention to the role ethnic groups played in Australian capitalism. This lack of attention is particularly curious in historical studies of Greek Australia given the significance of small business in facilitating migration and settlement. From Federation onwards, Greek ethnic capitalism - or, more precisely, the relations between Greek migrant labourers and their petite bourgeoisie employers - became a topic of media coverage. In fact, the relations between Greek workers and employers were so important that newspapers routinely reported on the subject. This article examines this media coverage, its racialist and criminalising connotations, and historical relevance. It concludes with some observations on how histories of capitalism can productively engage with the histories of ethnicisation.

Henry Samuel Chapman (1803-1881) was one of the leading advocates of Responsible Government in the white-settler colonies. In tracing the biography and political opinions of one of its main proponents, we can trace roots of Responsible Government in 1830s-40s British radicalism, and see how its principles evolved in specific settler-colonial contexts, as well as being carried and adapted from Canada, to New Zealand and the Australian colonies. Chapman’s extensive writings, including his influential legal judgments, show how a high-level colonial official expressed his contradictory views on Indigenous people, both before and after his own extensive encounters with Maori in particular.

Relationships with the Past: How Australian Television Dramas Talk about Indigenous History

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Drawing from Indigenous and critical race approaches, I develop the concept “transversal modes of life” to theorize the operations and effects of how settler colonial capital affects relationships of solidarity between Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour (BIPOC). I argue that transversal modes of life contribute to: (1) better understanding and critiquing the ways that colonial-capitalist relations emerge to create an array of complex, varied, and uneven structural divisions between and among BIPOC; and (2) building a politics of action predicated on plural modes of being and becoming that transcend these processes and generate place-based relations that respect and actively support what Glen Sean Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson refer to as “grounded normativity.” Through a critical inquiry into the salmon-canning industry in early to mid-twentieth-century British Columbia, Canada, I contend that the analytical lens of transversal modes of life shows that settler colonial relations of capital are characterized by the following three features: first, although people of colour may not choose their social positioning with Indigenous peoples in the development of the settler colonial state, this does not remove our complicity in formations that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waters but in fact complicates that relationship; second, capitalist development within the Canadian settler colonial context produces transversal modes of life that have developed by structurally positioning Black peoples and people of colour within processes of dispossession; and third, transversality draws attention to the dynamics between Indigenous dispossession and exploitation of non-white labour, which are always already relational.