Abstract
This article explores interculturalism in Australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. Fostering interculturalism—as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference—across Indigenous and non-Indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in Australia. This paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, ‘what is interculturalism’, that is, what is beyond the rhetoric and policy speak? The second commitment is to examine the pressures that stymy the articulation of interculturalism as a broad-based project, and lastly the article strives to highlight possibilities for interculturalism through consideration of empathic understandings of sustainable futures and land security in Australia. Legislative land rights and land activism arranged around solidarity movements for sustainable futures are taken up as the two sites of analysis. In the first instance, a case is made for legislative land rights as a form of coloniality that maintains the centrality of state power, and in the second, land activism, as expressed in the campaigns of Seed, Australia’s first Indigenous youth-led climate network and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, are identified as sites for plurality and as staging grounds for intercultural praxis.
Highlights
This article explores interculturalism in the context of a settler colonial nation
Coloniality is dependent upon deep colonising, a condition in which the process of conquest remains embedded within institutions and practices aimed at reversing the effects of colonisation, “where colonial authority can still define
This paper offers a preliminary scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, what is interculturalism, that is, what is it beyond the rhetoric and policy speak? The second commitment is to examine the pressures that stymy the articulation of interculturalism as a broad-based project, and lastly the article strives to highlight
Summary
This article explores interculturalism in the context of a settler colonial nation. In this instance the context is Australia, a nation marked by the prevailing impact of coloniality and deep colonising (Bradley and Seton 2005; Grosfoguel 2011; Marchetti 2006; Rose 1996). Grosfoguel (2007, 2011), taking the lead from Quijano (1993), conceptualizes coloniality as the entanglement of power, and the ‘coloniality of power’ as being “based in race and racism as the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system” (Quijano 1993). This is authority expressed through policy interventions, land rights law, and economic interventions in some, but not all Aboriginal lives, families and communities as distinctive cultural and social units set within and apart from the Australian white population Examining how interculturalism might support land related matters, such as ecological health and land security for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, within the context of coloniality, progresses the theme of intercultural health, whereby the health and well-being of those marginalised through the violence of settler colonialism and its structural legacy is taken seriously by the nation. The driving questions for this and current wider research are: how might White Australians begin to appreciate the need for land security as living justice among Aboriginal people, and how might collective action for sustainable futures articulate something of an intercultural commitment? If adjusted through a broader commitment to responsive reflexivity and empathy as a site of learning new axiological habits, which support plurality and interculturalism may be cultivated
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