Performing the Bounds of Responsibility

Karen Berger

doi:10.3390/h10040112

Abstract

This paper investigates border-making dynamics in the two political arenas where my subjectivity is most acutely implicated across time—the Jewish Holocaust (as an intergenerational victim) and the Aboriginal genocide (as an unwitting beneficiary). Albeit that there are many differences between the drivers of antisemitism and racism against Indigenous Australians, I investigate both of these racist structures through the lens of border-thinking as theorised by Walter Mignolo as a method of decolonisation (2006). The article has been formatted as an example of discursive border-crossing by juxtaposing theoretical ideas (particularly inspired by Zygmunt Bauman and Deborah Bird Rose) with interjections from my personal journal. I explore my own performative storytelling as a means for me to take responsibility to question power structures, acknowledge injustice, and to enact the potential for ethical dialogue between myself and others. This responsibility gestures to the possibility of border crossing as an ‘act of liberation’ that resides in the acknowledgement of historical injustices and their continued impact on both the beneficiaries and the victims of coloniality in the present.

Highlights

This article investigates the ways borders operate in order to explore the limits of personal responsibility for acknowledging injustice
I explore my own performative storytelling as a means for me to take responsibility to question power structures, acknowledge injustice, and to enact the potential for ethical dialogue between myself and others. This responsibility gestures to the possibility of border crossing as an ‘act of liberation’ that resides in the acknowledgement of historical injustices and their continued impact on both the beneficiaries and the victims of coloniality in the present
In foregrounding my own process, my focus is on the value of the storytelling witness when faced with the two particular atrocities where I am the most implicated: as an intergenerational victim of the Jewish Holocaust and as an unwitting beneficiary of the Aboriginal genocide in Australia

Summary

Introduction

This article investigates the ways borders operate in order to explore the limits of personal responsibility for acknowledging injustice. Their Facebook post states, ‘We urge all those to redirect the Through the Djap Wurrung Facebook page I discovered that another Aboriginal activist group, Warriors of graffiti tagging to local church’s [sic] and other significant colonial buildings and instithe Aboriginal Resistance (WAR), were recently visiting a nearby sacred women’s site, Sister Rocks, near tutions’. These rocks are covered with graffiti from early colonial times until the present.

Border Thinking

Witnessing Holocausts

The performing the the ‘Book of Job’

Conclusions