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Child talks back

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.

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‘I sing to you / from my place with my righteous kin’: Judith Wright’s decolonial poetics

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.

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Charles Darwin: towards a bio-religious and colonial genealogy of evolutionary being

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.

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Are tradition and modernity antagonistic? Ambedkar in and against the postcolonial project

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’?

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