Introduction: Performing (Re)conciliation in Settler Societies

Abstract

In contemporary settler societies reconciliation has emerged as a potent and alluring form of Utopian politics. Across the globe, liberal democratic settler nations, generally resistant to formal processes of decolonization, have been compelled to make new and urgent political compacts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to address the legacy of violent pasts, stabilize the present, and imagine new national futures. In former colonies of British settlement, such as Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States of America, where Indigenous peoples and settlers grapple with the pernicious and ongoing effects of colonization, ‘reconciliation’ has become a political catch cry, and public projects for transformative change have been inaugurated in its name. Here, the Utopian politics of reconciliation emerge most powerfully in the realm of public performance and are greatly bound up in a culture and economy of affect, expressing the desire for virtuous compact, unity and redemption under the sign of nation. These affective performances take us into the space of the imaginary as we seek to create mythic covenants, but they also call on the violent past. And like all Utopian forms, the politics of reconciliation in settler societies, which demand consensus and often Indigenous volition, can be rejected.