ABSTRACT Erica Burman’s Fanon, Education, Action: Child as Method published (Paperback) in 2019 continues to gain ground in cultural and social critique, research, policy and practice. No review so far, however, has addressed the book’s avowed and evident resonances with, and contributions to postcolonial theory/studies. This essay intends to highlight the book’s exceptional import on postcolonial critique, albeit in a selective and limited manner, given the work’s wide breadth of postcolonial themes, resources and study areas. This reviewer’s intent, I argue, can be pursued through the prism of key critical points raised by Benita Parry back in the 1980s to 1990s, on the false starts and mis-directions treaded by the burgeoning field of deconstructionist ‘colonial discourse theory.’ Fanon, Education, Action goads deconstructive critiques to be conceptually provocative and workable at the same time for resistance, change and emancipation. Fanon was a highly influential precursor of anti-colonial and liberationist critique, who is moreover engaged by Burman in ways heretofore unprecedented in Fanonian scholarship. By focusing her analytical lens on the forward-looking and decolonizing Fanon, Burman revivifies and mobilizes the postcolonial project towards policy and actionality in education, and other forms of individual and socio-political transformation.

ABSTRACT Widely celebrated as one of the most influential twentieth-century Australian poets, Judith Wright occupies a central and uncontested space in the national literary canon. The political drive of her poetry, intertwined with her lifelong commitment to ecological and Indigenous rights activism, transformed the platform afforded her as a ‘poet of the land’ into a discursive space through which to contest the legitimacy of her own positioning – as a settler, as a poet, and perhaps most significantly as an anticolonial ally. Despite this, and despite the growing urgency of conversations about institutional decolonization, Wright’s complex legacy as a decolonial agent remains largely uncontested. This article considers Wright’s poetic capacity to strike at the foundation upon which she stands and to excavate the violent histories beneath it; however, it also illuminates the inherited literary traditions that stunt her disruptive efforts. Drawing her contribution as a writer-activist into broader reflections on decolonization, I demonstrate the lasting significance of Wright’s reparative gestures – acknowledging and attending to active silences – as a timely model for literary canon reformation. Such (re)considerations of Wright’s legacy raise pertinent questions about what constitutes decolonial literary activism and gesture towards the silences as yet unbroken by the broader decolonial project.

ABSTRACT The debate over the status of mātauranga Māori – the practices and ideas of the first inhabitants of the islands that became known under British colonial rule as New Zealand – has a significance reaching far beyond its shores. The Māori peoples are amongst many indigenous groups globally who found their cultures deprecated by outsiders assuming the role of a governing power. But since the latter part of the twentieth century, arguments for the value of indigenous knowledge have been re-asserted in protest at the perceived dominance of a Western scientific paradigm. Indeed, some defenders of mātauranga Māori want to give it scientific status. Critics reply that mātauranga Māori does not generate genuine knowledge of universals and thus cannot support modern technology. This paper argues that both sides have tended to conflate science with technology, thus treating science as the sovereign standard of all useful knowledge. But not all knowledge must constitute science in order to be worth studying, and science is not wisdom. The paper suggests that recent efforts to give an independent status to indigenous knowledge of the kind that mātauranga Māori represents can be supported by a distinction between ideal types of practical and theoretical knowledge.

ABSTRACT While studies have examined Charles Darwin's wide social and political impact, they have not adequately centred the combined influence of colonial systems of human differentiation and religion within them. To address this, I draw from Sylvia Wynter's critique concerning how religious and colonial discourses contribute to the shifting development of Man within the Western tradition. Specifically, I explore how Darwin focused his evolutionary gaze towards one of the unique foundations of what it meant to be human in his time: religion. Tracing the entangled religious and colonial filiations of Darwin's thought, I show that he established an evolutionary link between human and non-human animals by proposing both Indigenous peoples and dogs held superstitious beliefs. To illustrate this, I show that Darwin transposed Victorian anthropological conceptions of religion - as a quantifiable object of knowledge corresponding to the intellect and associated with phrenology, dream theory and the apparitional soul - into a bio-religious conception of evolution. Furthermore, I argue that Darwin's bio-evolutionism assumes Christianity is most closely associated with abstract reason. Finally, analyzing the role of race in Darwin's thought, I suggest that theology is not what was before modern scientific bio-evolutionary conceptions of race, but at its very core.

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to demystify the antagonistic relationship between modernity and tradition as construed by Ashis Nandy. As a prominent voice in postcolonial scholarship, Nandy saw modernity as a colonial conception of rights, self, and society. Nandy’s critique of modernity laid the grounds for several projects that rejected the modern consensus for its colonial origins. Juxtaposing Nandy’s reiteration of early anti-modern nationalist thought with a multi-dimensional reading of colonial modernity in contemporary Ambedkarite scholarship, this paper explores the ambivalences of negotiating modern liberalism in a postcolonial order of hierarchical group identities. Despite the close imbrication of modernity with the imperial centre, Ambedkarite scholarship demonstrated how B.R. Ambedkar, synthesized a middle ground, where he incorporated the promise of modernity to liberate the ‘individual’ without dismissing the ‘communal’ collective self, construed by traditions. While postcolonial scholarship is heterogeneous, following Nandy, huge postcolonial melancholia has conflated modernity with coloniality. How do we rethink postcolonial theory from its current culturalist posturing to (re)claim the emancipatory potential of both modernity and tradition? Could it be that Nandy’s anxiety and discomfort with modernity fail to ‘contemporise theory’?