Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence [1 ed.] 1032056576, 9781032056579

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Introduction: Mapping Deathscapes
PART I: Deathscapes intersectionalities
Overview
1 Violence and intersecting power relations
2 The colonial debtscape
3 “You have to pay with your body”: sexual violence, border violence and the settler state
PART II: Making Indigenous women visible in the deathscape
Overview
4 Data silence in the settler archive: Indigenous femicide, deathscapes and social media
5 “Say her name”: naming Aboriginal women in the justice system
6 Close the Inquest
PART III: Refugees in the deathscape: Crimes of peace
Overview
7 The confined sea and the wavering of sovereignty
8 Racialized violence in Europe: the Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees?
9 Life and death at the digitalized border: “Access denied”
10 Fatal prescriptions: immigration detention, mismedication and the necropolitics of uncare
PART IV: Aesthetic witnessing in the deathscape
Overview
11 Artistic responses to historical and ongoing genocidal violence against Aboriginal women
12 Looking into the world from somewhere else: mapping and the visualisation of racial violence in Australia
13 Perpetual trauma: witnessing deathscapes of the colonial project
PART V: Afterwords
14 After Abolition
15 Transformative justice
Index

Citation preview

Mapping Deathscapes

This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres. An international team of authors takes a multidisciplinary approach to questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site. This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies and Law. Suvendrini Perera is John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Curtin University, Australia. She is author/editor of nine books including the monographs Survival Media (2017), Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats and Bodies (2009) and Reaches of Empire 1992). Joseph Pugliese is Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. His previous books include Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics (Routledge, 2010), State Violence and the Execution of Law: Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Routledge, 2012) and Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (2020).

Routledge Research in Digital Humanities

The Routledge Research in Digital Humanities series is an interdisciplinary monograph series which publishes current research into the field of digital humanities. The books in the series address methodological and conceptual digital humanities issues and explain how the software or the techniques used broaden the possibilities for digital humanities and their respective field. In the same series: Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City Edited by Nicholas Terpstra and Colin Rose Visualizing Venice: Mapping and Modeling Time and Change in a City Edited By Kristin L. Huffman, Andrea Giordano, Caroline Bruzelius Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence Edited by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

Mapping Deathscapes Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence

Edited by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-05657-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-06075-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20061-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements List of contributors Introduction: Mapping Deathscapes

ix xiii xv 1

SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE W I T H C O N T R I B U T I O N S BY M I C H E L L E B U I , P I L A R K A S AT, AY M A N  QWA I D E R A N D R A E D YAC O U B

PART I

Deathscapes intersectionalities Overview

23 24

SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE

1 Violence and intersecting power relations

27

PAT R I C I A H I L L C O L L I N S

2 The colonial debtscape

46

M A R I A G I A N N AC O P O U L O S

3 “You have to pay with your body”: sexual violence, border violence and the settler state

62

SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE

PART II

Making Indigenous women visible in the deathscape Overview SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE

79 80

vi

Contents

4 Data silence in the settler archive: Indigenous femicide, deathscapes and social media

84

B RO N W Y N C A R L S O N

5 “Say her name”: naming Aboriginal women in the justice system

106

H A N N A H M c G L A D E A N D S T E L L A TA R R A N T

6 Close the Inquest

127

A L I S O N W H I T TA K E R

PART III

Refugees in the deathscape: Crimes of peace Overview

129 130

SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE

7 The confined sea and the wavering of sovereignty

133

M AU R I Z I O A L B A H A R I

8 Racialized violence in Europe: the Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees?

148

M AR I NA GR ŽI N IĆ

9 Life and death at the digitalized border: “Access denied”

163

M. I. FRANKLIN

10 Fatal prescriptions: immigration detention, mismedication and the necropolitics of uncare

183

J O N AT H A N X AV I E R I N DA

PART IV

Aesthetic witnessing in the deathscape Overview

199 200

SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE

11 Artistic responses to historical and ongoing genocidal violence against Aboriginal women T E S S A L L A S A N D RU B E N A L L A S

204

Contents 12 Looking into the world from somewhere else: mapping and the visualisation of racial violence in Australia

vii 217

A N T O N I O T R AV E R S O

13 Perpetual trauma: witnessing deathscapes of the colonial project

239

A DR I A N ST I MSON

PART V

Afterwords

255

14 After Abolition

257

K Y L E C A R R E RO L O P E Z

15 Transformative justice

258

SU V EN DR I N I PER ER A A N D JOSEPH PUGLI E SE

Index

265

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this book contains the names and images of people who have died.

Figures

   



Part III.1 7.1 8.1 Part IV.1 11.1

Marziya Mohammedali, Call Them Home 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michelle Bui. Marziya Mohammedali, Call Them Home, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michelle Bui. Instrumentalised Exposure: In Transit. Screenshot from Deathscapes case study, “Extraterritorial Killings: The Weaponisation of Bodies.” Call to Account, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia. Deathscapes. Photo: Charandev Singh. Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Installation View.

130 134 157 200

x Figures Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 207 11.2 Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Installation View. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 208

11.5

Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Detail. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 210 11.6 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below, 2016. Installation View. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 211





Figures  xi 13.8 Adrian Stimson. Sick and Tired. 13.9 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 13.10 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 13.11 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 13.12 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre. 13.13 Adrian Stimson. Aggressive Assimilation. 13.14 Adrian Stimson. Silent Witness.

248 249 250 251 252 253 254

Afterword 1  Saying Their Names, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia, June 2020. Installation in solidarity with George Floyd protests. Photo: Anonymous. Reproduced with permission.259 Afterword 2  “Still No Truth, Justice or Peace. Unresolved Killing,” Invasion Day, 26 January 2018, Sydney, Australia. Photo: Joseph Pugliese.263

Acknowledgements

The Deathscapes Project, and this edited volume that flows from it, was first conceptualised on the lands of the Noongar and Gadigal Nations. We acknowledge the unceded sovereignty of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation and the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and their Elders past and present. We recognise and respect their ongoing struggle to achieve justice in the context of the deathscapes of the settler state. We also acknowledge the many other Indigenous Nations in which the contributors to this volume reside and the different collectives who are working towards the realisation of justice. The research project Deathscapes: Mapping Race and State Violence in Settler Societies was funded by the Australia Research Council under its Discovery Projects Scheme (DP 160100303) from 2016 to 2020. The transnational team of researchers comprised Partner Investigators M.I. Franklin (Lead, UK hub) and Jonathan Inda (Lead, U.S. hub) and in Australia Chief Investigators Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, with Dean Chan as Project Manager. The researchers on the project were Michelle Bui, Pilar Kasat, Beatriz Maldonado, Ayman Qwaider, Charandev Singh and Raed Yacoub. Sincere thanks to all who supported the Deathscapes Project, as members of the Ethics Advisory Board, as speakers at the launches in London and Sydney, and in many other ways. Special thanks to: Safdar Ahmed, Maurizio Albahari, Tess and Ruben Allas, Nicole Anderson, Paola Balla, Bronwyn Carlson, Chris Cunneen, Claude De Lucia, Maria Giannacopoulos, Julie Gough, Paul Gregoire, Cat Ivinson, Carolyne Jackson, John Kinsella, Thor Kerr, Julian Knowles, Barry Lavallee, Chris Lewis, Hannah McGlade, Steve Mickler, Marziya Mohammedali, Alison Neville, Goldie Osuri, Lara Palombo, Marilena Parlati, Phil Scraton, Tommy Segoro, Jordy Silverstein, Marisa Sposaro and the 3CR team, Adrian Stimson, Bertrand Tungandame, Uncle Ben Cuimermara Taylor, Sunera Thobani, Jan Turner, Daisy Ward, Nichole Watson and Alison Whittaker. We are very grateful to Suzanne Richardson at Routledge for her warm support for the book from the outset, and to the team at Routledge for their work.

xiv Acknowledgements Our sincere appreciation to the artists, photographers and writers who generously gave permission for their work to appear on the Deathscapes site. Above all, our heartfelt acknowledgement to those individuals, families and communities whose stories and testimonies are at the centre of   the Deathscapes Project. They animate our work because, as Patricia Hill Collins notes in her opening chapter in this volume, “understanding … varying histories [of violence] from the standpoints of those who live them is essential in building a transversal politics that is simultaneously local and global.” *** The following poems were previously published and are reproduced here with permission: Kyle Carerro Lopez, “After Abolition,” The Nation (October 2020); Alison Whittaker, “Close the Inquest,” Right Now (August 2, 2019).

Contributors

Maurizio Albahari  is Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame University. He is author of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations and the World’s Deadliest Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and Tra la Guerra e il Mare: Democrazia Migrante e Crimini di Pace (Manifestolibri, Italy, 2017). Ruben Allas has worked in the areas of Aboriginal criminal justice, housing, employment, children’s welfare in Victoria, South Australia and NSW. His research in criminal justice particularly on Aboriginal over-representation in arrests had been cited by various governments, particularly in their reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody. He has published reports, critical reviews and articles on Australian Aboriginal art. Tess Allas is an award-winning independent visual arts curator, researcher and writer specialising in contemporary Indigenous art. She has published broadly in this field for institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Artspace and the Kluge Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, as well as for many contemporary art journals including Artlink, Artist Profile and Art Monthly Australia. She has authored over 400 biographies of Australian Indigenous artists for the Design and Art Australia online website. Bronwyn Carlson is Professor of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University. She is author of The Politics of Identity: Who Counts as Aboriginal Today? (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016). She is founding and managing editor of the Journal of Global Indigeneity and the convenor of The Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence (FIRE). Patricia Hill Collins  is Distinguished University Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Her books include Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge, 1990, 2000), Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, 8th ed. (2013), edited with Margaret Andersen; Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism

xvi Contributors (Routledge, 2004); Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies, edited with John Solomos (Sage, 2010). M.I. Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths (UK) and the UK/EU Hub Lead in the ARC funded project Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States (2016–2020). Author of Postcolonial Politics, the Internet and Everyday Life: Pacific Traversals Online (Routledge, 2004), and Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance, and the Internet (Oxford University Press, 2013) among many other titles, she has been active in human rights advocacy for internet policy and design at the UN and EU level for some years. Her latest book is entitled Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural (Oxford University Press, 2021). Maria Giannacopoulos is critical legal theorist and senior lecturer in sociolegal studies at Flinders University where she teaches criminology. Since 2015 she has published on the imperialising logics connecting the sovereign debt crisis in Greece with the effaced debt crisis of colonial Australia. She is co-editor of Globalizations special issue ‘Law, Love and Decolonization’ with decolonial criminologist Professor Biko Agozino. Her forthcoming book Sovereign Debt, Austerity and the Endurance of Colonialism is under contract with Palgrave. Marina Gržinić is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, and the Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts. Her recent books include the edited collection, Border Thinking Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence (Vienna and Berlin: Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Vol 21., and Sternberg Press, 2018). Jonathan Xavier Inda  is Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His research areas include immigration politics and policy; criminalization and punishment; race, science and medicine; culture and globalization; and Latina/o populations in the United States. Among his publications are Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (Routledge, 2014) and Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in New Jersey. He is the author of the chapbook Muscle Memory, winner of the 2021 PANK Little Book contest. He also co-founded LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. Hannah McGlade is an Indigenous human rights law researcher whose work has focussed on Aboriginal women and children, race discrimination, incarceration and prisoners, health justice and indigenous governance.

Contributors  xvii She has helped to establish legal services for Aboriginal victims of family violence and sexual assault, a peak body for Aboriginal children, and advised state and federal government on law reforms. An expert member of the UN Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issue, and former Senior Indigenous Fellow of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr McGlade in her work seeks to promote respect for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples for Aboriginal people. Suvendrini Perera is John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor at Curtin University, Australia. She is author/editor of nine books including the monographs Survival Media (Palgrave, 2009), Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats and Bodies (Palgrave, 2009) and Reaches of Empire (Columbia University Press, 1992). Joseph Pugliese  is Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. His previous books include Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics (Routledge, 2010) and State Violence and the Execution of Law: Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Routledge, 2012). His most recent book is Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Duke University Press, 2020). Adrian Stimson  is an interdisciplinary artist who has received numerous awards including the Canadian Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2018. He is member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, Canada. Adrian’s performance art looks at identity construction, specifically the hybridization of the Indian, cowboy, shaman and Two Spirit (Queer) being. His installation work primarily examines the Canadian residential school experience; having attended three residential schools in his life, he uses material culture from these sites to create work that speaks to genocide, loss and resilience. Stella Tarrant is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Western Australia, working in the area of criminal defences. She is interested in how ways of thinking about gender that pervade criminal trials can invisibilise violence against women, so that the protective laws of selfdefence are not applied, in spite of law reforms that recognise self-defence against non-imminent harm. She has worked recently with Dr Hannah McGlade on legal and advocacy work on behalf of Jody Gore (Western Australia v Gore (2017) and with Professor Julia Tolmie and George Giudice on a test case appeal in Western Australia v Liyanage (2017). Her research undertaken for the Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) is published in S. Tarrant, J. Tolmie and G. Giudice, Transforming Legal Understandings of Intimate Partner Violence (ANROWS, 2019). Antonio Traverso  teaches Screen Studies at Curtin University, Australia. He is the author of Documentary Cinema in Chile (forthcoming), and

xviii Contributors co-editor of El Documental Político en Argentina, Chile y Uruguay (2015), Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America (2014) and Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media (Routledge, 2011). Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi woman, law academic and poet. She is Senior Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute.

Introduction Mapping Deathscapes Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese with contributions by Michelle Bui, Pilar Kasat, Ayman Qwaider and Raed Yacoub The Deathscapes project takes root from the work of the late Uncle Ray Jackson, Wiradjuri activist, intellectual and long-time campaigner to hold the state to account for deaths of people held in its custody in Australia. Since 2010, Uncle Ray initiated, as part of his abolitionist activism, a series of Aboriginal passports ceremonies, staged in collaboration with Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies. For Uncle Ray, the conferring of an Aboriginal passport signified an act of reciprocal recognition in defiance of the colonizing settler state, a compact between the very bodies upon whose violent exclusion the sovereignty of that state is founded: The issuing of the Passports covers two areas of interactions between the Traditional Owners of the Lands and migrants, asylum seekers and other non-Aboriginal citizens in this country. Whilst they acknowledge our rights to all the Aboriginal Nations of Australia, we reciprocate by welcoming them into our Nations. (Indigenous Social Justice Association 2012) The issue of Aboriginal passports to non-Aboriginal people is a powerful act that reclaims Aboriginal sovereignty over unceded land. The Aboriginal passport ceremonies reference a history in which papers, passes and certificates—and the lack of these documents—circumscribed Aboriginal peoples’ citizenship and regulated their own free movement across the lines drawn by the colonial state. These exclusionary histories are inverted in the issuing of passports to those now cast out by the state. By resignifying the passport as an Aboriginal technology that legitimates non-Indigenous people’s movement through Australia’s Aboriginal Nations, the Passport Ceremonies at once mark Aboriginal people’s unextinguished sovereignty over their country and their right to offer welcome and hospitality within their own lands. For migrants, refugees and the undocumented, the passport confers legitimacy and the right of arrival. The border is a site of conjuncture for these two types of illegalized subjects of the settler colonial state. The Aboriginal passport is the counter-technology through which that state’s sovereign claims may begin to be undone.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-1

2  Suvendrini Perera et al. The passport ceremonies demonstrate Uncle Ray Jackson’s acute understanding of the inextricable link between unextinguished Aboriginal sovereignty and the illegal occupation of the continent on the one hand and settler colonial Australia’s repressive immigration policies on the other. The traditional borders of Indigenous nations were overrun by the establishment of the settler colonial state of Australia, and Indigenous subjects were excluded from full citizenship within the borders of the usurping state. Externally, the White Australia Policy and its infamous border practices, such as the dictation test, were long employed by the settler state to exclude those it regarded as threatening its sovereign authority: both its political enemies—unionists, communists—and a shifting cast of racial undesirables. By reclaiming their sovereignty through the act of issuing their own passports, Indigenous subjects symbolically reassume their right to offer welcome to those rejected and criminalised by the settler state, in particular asylum seekers and refugees deemed “illegals” (Perera and Pugliese 2015; Pugliese 2015). In 2010, Uncle Ray Jackson, with Elder Robbie Thorpe, issued passports in absentia to Sri Lankan asylum seekers being held in limbo in Indonesia aboard a boat bound for Australia. Subsequently, in a powerful ceremony held outside the walls of the Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney in 2012, Aboriginal Nations passports were conferred on two Tamil men indefinitely imprisoned on the basis of secret security findings to which they had no access (Refugee Action Coalition 2012). In 2014, a large passport ceremony was held at The Settlement in Redfern, the heartland of Aboriginal urban activism, to confer passports on hundreds more migrants and asylum seekers. Four years later, the Deathscapes website was launched at the same site, in tribute to Uncle Ray who did not live to see the project come to fruition. This volume is one of his many enduring legacies to the work of seeking justice for the incarcerated and those who die in state custody.

Sovereignty and the border The Deathscapes project begins here at the colonial border, where the deaths of Indigenous people in custody and the deaths of refugees at sea or in detention centres are connected through the intersecting structures of settler sovereignty—that is, the supreme authority deployed by a state in order to govern its people and territories. Sovereignty is the principal power that underpins a state’s institutions of governance (such as Federal Parliaments or Congress) and its laws and law-making powers (at both legislative and juridical levels). A nation’s sovereignty is enforced and securitised by such repressive apparatuses as the police force (at the domestic level) and the military (to protect its borders and to fight off external threats). The delineation of the border is central to the project of the settler colonial state, as it overrides the borders of pre-existing nations and assumes the right to

Introduction  3

Figure Introduction 1 Portal to the Deathscapes Site. Deathscapes.

determine who may or may not enter the new territorial entity of the settler nation. The eliminatory logic of settler colonialism (Wolfe 2016), with its aspiration to expunge the presence of the Indigene from the land and to assert its own usurping sovereignty in its place, is predicated on overrunning existing borders and establishing new ones in their place. Redrawing Indigenous nations’ borders secures settler colonial ownership of the new national entity in space as well as time and assumes the power to confer or withhold citizen status within it. Indigenous peoples, displaced, dispossessed and stripped of national status, themselves become refugees on their own land losing, as marked above, the right to offer hospitality within their borders, among other crucial rights of sovereignty (Birch 2001). As we write elsewhere: The very fact that Australian settler state was founded on the usurpation of unceded Indigenous sovereignty can be seen to be structurally connected to its insistent militarisation of the border. The militarisation of the border functions as a critical mode through which to assert the settler state’s sovereignty … The Australian government’s ongoing instrumentalisation of asylum seekers and refugees into enemies that threaten the integrity and freedom of the Australian state emerges as a strategic logic that rationalises both the militarisation of the border–in order to ‘stop the boats!’–and the transmutation of asylum seekers and refugees into weapons of deterrence. The militarisation of the border, the naming of asylum seekers and refugees as ‘enemies’ and their instrumentalisation into weapons of deterrence–all effectively work … to produce the always-at-risk illegitimate sovereignty of the settler state. (Perera and Pugliese 2020, 479)

4  Suvendrini Perera et al. While the deaths of Indigenous, Black and other people of colour at the hands of the state have become newly visible in the last decade, as have the deaths of refugees and asylum seekers at the borders of the global north, the Deathscapes project is the first to connect these two forms of state violence by deploying the framework of settler sovereignty’s violent racial practices and its making, remaking and unmaking of borders.

Crossing borders in the Deathscapes project The research project “Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies” was funded by the Australian Research Council from 2016 to 2020. Chapters and brief contributions by a number of the transnational team of researchers are included in this volume. As a transnational research project, the Deathscapes website presents case studies documenting racialized deaths in custody across Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom/European Union, situating them within the shared contexts and interrelated practices of the settler state as they are embedded within contemporary global structures. Through the inclusion of the United Kingdom and European Union, as historical points of origin for settler colonialism, the project traces the continuing processes of racialization in these places, and what Nicholas De Genova describes as the often disavowed “brute racial fact” of the current European border regime (2018, 1766). The case studies on the site document and collectively trace the intersectional relations that inscribe deaths across settler states in spaces such as prison cells (Maldonado 2019; Bui et al. 2017), detention centres (Yacoub and Franklin 2019; Inda 2018a; Bui et al. 2018), refugee boats (Bui et al. 2020; Franklin and Yacoub 2017), check points (Inda 2018b), carceral medical units (Inda 2018a) and so on. As Jordy Silverstein writes in her commentary on Deathscapes: In taking this cross-border approach, the constant project of creating and maintaining settler-colonial sovereignty is highlighted. The perpetuation of deaths in custody is understood, then, as one technique, or technology, of that governmental rule. That is, the Deathscapes project understands the creation of death – the necropolitical drive – as a planned tool of government. Deaths in custody of racialized people, Deathscapes affirms, are not an accident. They are by design. They are a feature, not a bug, of the system. (Silverstein 2019)

Sovereign power, territorial violence and the state trafficking In connecting Indigenous deaths and other racialized deaths, such as those of refugees and migrants, within settler states, the Deathscapes project aims

Introduction  5 to make visible the shared strategies, policies, practices and rationales of state violence deployed in the management of separate racialized categories of the population. One of these shared practices, accompanying the assertion of sovereignty as the sole prerogative of the state, is the prerogative to control the movement of bodies within those borders. Following this logic, Muscogee scholar Sarah Deer has argued that colonialism in the Americas has long relied on the trafficking of Indigenous people across borders to establish and secure settler dominance over the land (Deer 2010). Once it is situated as a practice internal to settler states such as Canada and the United States, trafficking becomes visible as an act of territorial violence against Indigenous women, in particular—rather than one through which the global south attempts to infiltrate the global north. Understood within the framework of the settler colonialism, the states of Australia, Canada and the United States are revealed as themselves agents of trafficking rather than helpless bystanders or enlightened enforcers of international law. Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt invokes this logic when she poses the question: “If human trafficking is about forced movement, exploitation, and the misuse of power in controlling the bodies of marginalised people, who has control over the movement, labour and bodies of Indigenous girls and women in Canada?” (Hunt 2010, 27). Just as the practices of the Canadian state amount to the trafficking of Indigenous women and girls, the practices of the United States towards Indigenous women on its southern border again demonstrate, in Hunt’s phrase, its “misuse of power in controlling the bodies of marginalised people” (2010, 27). Research by the Chickasaw scholar Shannon Speed highlights how the north/south border operates to “erase” the Indigenous status of Indigenous women who cross the border into the United States, rendering them (merely) “migrants”: Indigenous people from Latin America cannot and will not ever fully ‘qualify’ as Indigenous once they have entered the United States … The erasure of Indigenous migrants’ identity as Indigenous people is one in a long series of technologies used by settler states to eliminate Indigenous people. (2019, 12) Speed here identifies, among the settler colonial state’s repertoire of eliminatory practices, its elimination of Indigenous identities where they intersect with those of the migrant and the refugee. In Australia, there have been a number of recent attempts to deport Indigenous subjects on “character” grounds, thus defining their citizenship as a merely administrative matter, to be conferred or withheld by the state through the technology of the passport, rather than as a belonging that pre-exists that state and its territorial and temporal limits (Perera and Pugliese 2020).

6  Suvendrini Perera et al.

Indigenous femicide and resistance I am a Chilean-Australian and researcher on the Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State case study of the Deathscapes project. This case study illustrates the deliberate and systemic violence perpetuated on Indigenous women by the colonial settler states of Australia, Canada and the United States. Equally, it showcases the multiple ways in which Indigenous women have waged fierce and unwavering resistance to colonial power. Through song, poetry and the visual arts Indigenous women are making visible the horrors and brutality inflicted upon them. Injustices and pain find expression in red dresses hanging from trees, silent vigils and placards on the streets. This public expression of grief for Indigenous femicides in the colonial settler states connected me to the abhorrent reality of femicides across Abya Yala (Latin America). Fourteen of the 25 countries with the highest femicides rates are on the American continent (Pavesi and Widmer 2016). Indigenous women bear the brunt of both state and family violence. An example of the violence inflicted on Indigenous women for defending their ancestral lands is the 2016 assassination of Berta Caceres—Lenca activist and leader from Honduras—for her vocal opposition to the Agua Zarca Dam, a hydroelectric project that threatened her community’s livelihoods and the health of the sacred Gualcarque River. Senior executives of DESA, the company developing the Agua Zarca project, have been found guilty of her killing. Mohawk theorist Audra Simpson (2016) explains the continual level of violence against Indigenous women as part of the ongoing project of dispossession of Indigenous land across the globe: “This dispossession is raced and is gendered, and its violence is still borne by the living, the dead, and the disappeared corporealities of Native women” (Simpson 2016, 7). Despite this level of violence women are responding with massive public campaigns that are changing the way in which feminist movements are seen and the political influence they can yield. #NiUnaMenos (Not one [woman] less) that began in Argentina in 2015 has spread across Abya Yala with many other waves of feminist protest against all types of gender violence. Dr Pilar Kasat, Curtin University Researcher, Deathscapes, Australia hub

References Pavesi, I., Widmer, M. (2016). A gendered analysis of violent deaths. Small Arms Survey Research Notes (63). Retrieved from http://www.smallarmssurvey. org/fileadmin/docs/H-Research_Notes/SAS-Research-Note-63.pdf Simpson, A. (2016). The state is a man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders, and the gender of settler sovereignty. Theory and Event; Baltimore, 19.4, 1–6.

Introduction  7 As Speed’s research demonstrates, attending to strategies of sovereign territoriality makes it possible to connect forms of violence directed against refugees and Indigenous groups in new ways. Speed notes that Indigenous Studies and Migration Studies operate as largely separate disciplines in the United States. In recent documentations of death on the southern US border, for example, she finds that “issues of Indigenous dispossession, settler structures, and even capitalism … are absent or undertheorized, leading to an overemphasis on U.S. policy without an analysis of the structures that policy is defined within” (2019, 13). The frameworks of Indigenous dispossession and settler structures are lacking in many analyses of refugee policy in Australia as well. Yet, as we have shown above, refugee policy in Australia, with its insistence in securing the borders and its compulsive insularity, cannot be separated from the structures of settler sovereignty. In bringing together analyses of Indigenous and refugee deaths from a range of positions in this volume, we aim to extend the work of the Deathscapes project. The chapters in this volume (which we introduce in more detail in the overviews of each part of the volume) effectively enlarge the original Deathscapes aperture and bring into focus the expansive, transnational reach of regimes of racial, neocolonial and settler violence across diverse spaces and targeted subjects. The chapters are extended by the snapshots in this introduction from researchers on the project, opening out to other transnational contexts. Collectively, the contributions in this volume examine both the lethal effects of settler regimes as they unfold in their respective contexts and, simultaneously, they mark Indigenous peoples’ and refugees’ ongoing tactics of creative resistance, their corporeal acts of testimony which call the violence of the state to account and their insistence on the abolition of the racial-carceral-settler state.

The Deathscapes site as counter-archive As it crosses disciplines, categories and states, the Deathscapes website, the main outcome of the Deathscapes project, is constitutively intersectional (see Collins, Giannacopulos and Traverso this volume). The site is constructed on an architectonic plan of “rooms” or pavilions, the largest of which showcases individual case studies; nested within it are the lived histories, testimonies and analytical accounts of deaths in custody. The different case studies and rooms of the site are connected by hyperlinked “passages” or key terms. For example, the Military-Industrial-Border Complex refers to the conglomerate of state and non-state actors (the navy, private corporations, contractors) who are crucial in maintaining, reproducing and expanding racialized forms of governmentality, capture, punishment and profiteering in the context of targeted racialized populations; they link case studies that deal with the lethal effects of privatised medical and security operations in British detention centres and those in Australian offshore camps. Another key term, Weaponized Exposure,

8  Suvendrini Perera et al.

The Israeli settler-colonial deathscapes I am a Palestinian and Research Associate on the UK/EU hub of the Deathscapes project. The project’s case studies from Australia, the United States, and the European Union/United Kingdom depict unlawful acts perpetrated by individuals and organisations. They also reveal the deeper strategies of violence that underpin settler state interactions with colonized and Indigenous peoples. Israel also needs to be seen as a settler state. As a Palestinian, I would argue that the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine can also serve as a negative role-model for the links between occupation and the negation and dehumanisation of colonized lands and people. As someone who is living as part of the Palestinian diaspora, I am witnessing every day the legitimation of a fully-fledged apartheid system in which Palestinian life is “lesser than.” Sadly, the dehumanisation and racialization of unwanted others at the state level promotes not only unlawful killings and other acts of violence, but also opens the door to programs of ethnic cleansing and genocide. To illustrate, an example from the eastern neighbourhoods of Jerusalem: the case of Palestinian teenager Mohammad Sami Ali Kasba who threw one stone at an Israeli army vehicle. The brigade commander gave chase, shot and killed Kasba. At least three bullets struck him in the back, face and upper side of his torso as he attempted to flee (Parker and Barbara 2016). Two soldiers nudged Kasba’s body with their feet while he lay on the ground, leaving the scene without offering any medical help. As is the case with the majority of internal Israeli army investigations, the Kasba case was closed without convictions. The Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, stated that “this decision is an integral part of the whitewash mechanism which is Israel’s military investigative system” (2016). This killing is but one of the many examples of the systematic dehumanisation, and demonization, on the ground and online, that my people have endured for generations. Dr Raed Yacoub, Goldsmiths College Researcher, Deathscapes, UK/EU hub

References B’Tselem. (2016). Closing Case against Col. Shomer Integral Part of Whitewash Mechanism Which Is the Military Investigative System. https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20160410_muhammad_ali_qusbah_case_closed Parker, B., & Barbara, C. (2016). Israel’s Compliance with the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Ill-Treatment and Torture of Palestinian Children in Israeli Military Detention and Use of Excessive Force by Israeli Forces). Defence for Children International Palestine, and OMCT – World Organisation against Torture. https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CAT/Shared%20 Documents/ISR/INT_CAT_NGO_ISR_23473_E.pdf

Introduction  9 references how features of the landscape and environment, such as oceans, mountains and deserts, generally understood as “nature,” or elements such as extreme cold or heat, are channelled or activated by states such that they become the medium of death for target groups, whether in the case of the Indian or Mediterranean Oceans, or the deserts of southern Arizona. Such key concepts and terms mark the transnational relations that bind the various case studies. The architectonic metaphor of rooms and connecting passages organises the Deathscapes site and enables exchanges and links among its various sections. The virtual breakout space of a “courtyard garden,” accessible through selected portals within the case studies, offers a respite green space for reflection and grieving. This courtyard garden was designed as a spatio-temporal response to the often profoundly traumatising stories that constitute the affective fabric of the Deathscapes case studies. It offers visitors a contemplative place to breathe and ground themselves as they navigate the often harrowing visual and linguistic testimonies of the victims and survivors of state violence. In temporal terms, the courtyard acknowledges that these are not stories that can be merely scrolled through at speed. Rather, they are stories that catch the reader up, like stinging burs, stopping them in their tracks and requiring a temporal break to process what they have encountered as secondary witnesses before they can resume their virtual journey. Through such means of “aesthetic articulation,” Antonio Traverso notes, Deathscapes’ viewers are “exposed to meticulous contact with the full sensorium through diverse critical content and affective form” (see Chapter 12). We conceptualize Deathscapes as a project that crosses visual culture, aesthetics, politics, critical theory and social justice activism. While the case studies represent its primary research through analyses of specific deaths in custody, the Inspirations, Engagements and Galleries sections of the site present glimpses of the transnational and multi-dimensioned underpinnings of the project, drawing on performance, poetry and visual art as well as critical theory and activist manifestos. The Engagements section encompasses a range of activities, including creative protests, talks and dispatches, in which members, mostly from the Australian hub, present immediate reports from unfolding inquests and activist interventions. In her commentary on the site, Silverstein identifies these spaces as features through which the Deathscapes project “creates new languages and modes of description” as it attempts to address core questions that trouble humanities research: Increasingly, it seems, humanities academics are becoming more aware of the problems inherent to research, more attentive to thinking through the ethics of making or acquiring knowledge about, rather than with, subject peoples. The ‘ethics advisory board’, the engagement in activist spaces, the descriptions of the accessibility aspects of the site, the provision of links to support services, the making evident the ‘inspirations’

10  Suvendrini Perera et al. for the project, as well as the plain statement that the project’s ‘ultimate aim’ is ‘ending deaths in custody’– all of this means Deathscapes provides a model of how to do research in a genuinely collaborative and ethical way. Indeed, this is the vital work that academics can do: using research to build knowledge, links and solidarities. (Silverstein 2019) In a related vein, Traverso (Chapter 12) explores “the formal and material plurality of Deathscapes”: dispersed fragments of experiences of suffering, death, resilience and survival, are transformed into expressive structures of knowledge and meaning that, having been obliterated by colonial violence in the mainstream, are here decolonised, mapped, reassembled and recovered through remembrance, dialogue and reflection, meaningful material conduits of past experiences that become embodied in the experience of the present. In these various responses, the Deathscapes site emerges as a “living counterarchive" that, as Gretchen Coombs wrote in a review in Hyperallergic, “resists the 24-hour news cycle” of an enumeration of deaths. Through its multiple sections, the collation and curation of voices and images, and the space of its courtyard garden, it rather calls for “slow study” that “creates a contemplative space in which to see these events together, as an ongoing catalogue of settler violence” (Coombs 2019). “As a counter-archive that lives online,” Coombs marks that the site operates in tandem with a series of live events that activated it and “respond to and engage with current events in real time” (Coombs 2019). In another sense, too, Patricia Hill Collins points out that the Deathscapes site “cultivates a living archive” because what initially begins by documenting one case of racial violence or gender violence over time deepens as more systems of power come into view for explaining the same case: No case is ever ‘closed’ because people contribute to it over time. (Chapter 1, this volume) Collins, Silverstein, Traverso and Coombs all note that rather than being distinct from its case studies, the activist interventions of the Deathscapes project—including performance, installation and other creative forms—are integral to its research. In this sense, Collins makes the critical point that the Deathscapes project “models an important form of coalitional politics that brings intellectual work into closer alignment with the emotional, analytical and political elements of both grassroots political organizing and global social movements” (see Chapter 1). Instances of coalitional interventions that bring intellectual work and the emotional, analytical and political elements of grassroots and global social movements into closer alignment include the performance Call to Account, testifying to the abuses

Introduction  11 An extension of moments of resistance During the course of the Deathscapes project, there have been significant changes to how people imprisoned in immigration detention communicate with the outside world. Previously, activists in the immigration prisons would rely on contraband mobile phones to make covert messages and recordings  at considerable risk to themselves. This evidence was sent to sympathetic journalists via activists in the community. As access to mobile phones has increased, so has the visibility of resistance to Australia’s violent border policies. People deliberately silenced by the immigration detention regime have been able to author their own narratives and build sustained relationships and alliances with people in the community. The powerful art and activism of people like Behrouz Boochani, Eaten Fish, Mostafa Azimitabar and Farhad Bandesh has transcended the fences that have confined them. Community members have responded to their work by amplifying it and mobilizing around it, which has resulted in public protests; art exhibitions; the production of music videos, books and films; television appearances and countless media articles. There has also been growing recognition of how the violence perpetrated against people seeking asylum, refugees and migrants is a violence that is foundational to the formation of the Australian nation-state. Articulations of solidarity between refugees and First Nations communities in Papua New Guinea and Australia have challenged government agendas. Aboriginal passports have been disseminated to people in immigration detention. First Nations activists have joined the frontlines of protests outside sites of detention and recently, for example, after being released in Naarm [Melbourne] after more than seven years in detention, activist and artist, Farhad Bandesh was welcomed to country by Wurundjeri Elders and community members. The Deathscapes project in some respects functions as a partial archive and extension of these moments of resistance, solidarity and collective grief; documenting how communities struggle for justice and against systems that mark lives as disposable. While violence-saturated testimonies uncover hidden truths, the acts of love and solidarity that emerge from pain and mourning provide important glimmers of hope and help us imagine an alternative future. In trying to envision and work towards an end to state violence, the words of Behrouz Boochani (2017) reverberate, “We will never settle for anything less than freedom. Only freedom.” Michelle Bui, Curtin University Researcher, Deathscapes Australia hub

References Boochani, Behrouz. 2017. ‘This is hell out here’: how Behrouz Boochani’s diaries expose Australia’s refugee shame. The Guardian December 4. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/04/this-is-hell-behrouz-boochani-diaries-expose-australia-refugee-shame (accessed 8 October 2021).

12  Suvendrini Perera et al. of offshore detention, staged across three different cities in Australia (Perera and Pugliese 2018, see Part IV.1), or the projection/installation Saying Their Names (Hughes 2020). In its projections of the names of Indigenous people who had died in custody on a landmark sculpture in Walyalap [Fremantle], Australia, the latter responded both to the protests following the killing of George Floyd and the global movement to abolish racist monuments (see Afterword this volume). The Deathscapes site, in one sense, can be seen as a type of “anti-archive,” precisely because it refuses the classificatory categories that organise the official archives of the state, categories that reproduce their own forms of epistemic and symbolic violence. In other words, the site refuses to deploy the state’s classificatory categories of disembodied “data” and “statistics,” and those forensic descriptors that render its victims into disembodied objects of inquiry (see also Traverso, this volume). As an anti-archive, the site includes all the impassioned, unruly and affective dimensions that are otherwise purged and neutralised from the archives of the state as they effectively fall outside its forensic remits. As such, the Deathscapes site mobilises and brings to light precisely what the state attempts to redact and expunge from its archives: the torn bodies and violated voices, the anger, tears and the irrecuperable loss, as well as the creative energy and resistant agency of communities who continue to demand justice.

With historical eyes open As the Deathscapes site traces lines of connection that cross and interlink practices, histories, geographies and iconographies of state violence, it can be situated in the context of a range of recent projects, both visual and textbased, that pursue points of intersection across technologies of colonial violence, past and present, enacted on racialized bodies. One example is John Akomfrah’s film installation Vertigo Sea (2016), in which iconographies associated with the Middle Passage find their returns in today’s desperate and brutalizing voyages from African coasts. Another is David W. Blight starkly titled essay, “Frederick Douglass, Refugee,” reflecting on the intersections between the plight of the US’s most famous fugitive slave and US and European policies towards refugees and migrants today: Throughout modern history, the millions forced to flee as refugees and beg for asylum have felt Douglass’s agony, and thought his thoughts. So many nameless and faceless Syrians or Libyans, Iraqis or Sudanese, Iranians or Serbians have felt the same terrors in deserts, and in the billows of the Mediterranean. And now in airports and immigration offices, on college campuses and in the kitchens of most American restaurants. This is an ancient story; America came to it late, but with historical eyes open this nation knows it well. (Blight 2017)

Introduction  13 With historical eyes open, it is evident that the separation of children from their parents in residential schools in Canada (see Stimson this volume) and missions in Australia find their echoes in the Australian government’s contemporary practices of forcibly moving refugee and asylum seeker children and families to offshore island prisons, as well as in the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. In the context of the latter, African American scholar Jelani Cobb reminds us, too, that “the separation of families has deep roots in the American past,” and that the separation of children “was such a common feature of slavery” (Cobb 2018). Both Cobb and Blight make visible previously ignored or invisibilised interrelations among historical and current practices of displacement and enforced mass movements of transportation and deportation.

The Military-Industrial-Border Complex For the past four years that I worked on the Deathscapes project, I could not but see the parallels between the case studies and my own lived experience as a Palestinian. I was born and raised in one of Gaza’s eight  refugee camps, which have become home to over a million Palestinian refugees who were forcibly displaced from their homes and villages in 1948 and 1967. Experiencing the violence of a colonial settler state still in the making was a daily reality that manifested itself in every aspect of our life; and we had to be constantly resisting a complex matrix of military, political and psychological violence. Most striking, however, was seeing such parallels in the institutions used by the settler colonial states to impose their control. When I read about Mr. Ward, an Indigenous man who died of heatstroke after being transported in the back of a prison van from Laverton to Kalgoorlie in 2008, the fact that hit me the most was that the van in which Mr Ward was transported was managed by the prison security company called G4S. This very same security company runs the prison and detention centres in Israel where many Palestinian political prisoners are held: children, women, Palestinian Legislative Council members and university students. When I left Palestine for Australia in 2014,  I saw the G4S signs on Israeli soldier uniforms as I was crossing the Erez checkpoint, a military crossing point that connects Gaza with Israel, and the outside world. I, too, was ordered by a security guard on the checkpoint to comply with the rules or else risk losing my life. Ayman Qwaider, Curtin University Researcher, Deathscapes Australia hub

14  Suvendrini Perera et al. Nor are these points of intersection confined to the past. As a settler colonial state established in the twentieth century, Israel deploys many of the same practices of targeted violence, mass displacement and incarceration towards its Indigenous Palestinian population. The contributions by Deathscapes researchers Ayman Qwaider and Raed Yacoub in this introduction evidence how the Israeli state operates on the same lethal principles of its more established international allies—Australia, Canada and the United States. Founded on the same colonial fiction of terra nullius, or empty land open to sovereign expropriation by the colonising occupier, the Israeli state reiterates so many of the self-same strategies deployed by other settler states to secure the violent reality of settler rule. The legal fiction of terra nullius, and of the “myth of a ‘land without people’ … is not,” Nur Masalha (2007, 40) underlines, “an infamous fragment of early Zionist propaganda: it is ubiquitous in much of the Israeli historiography of nation-building.” Israeli nation-building here follows the precedential practices deployed by other settler states, including frontier wars, summary executions, the paramilitary campaigns of terror unleashed by settlers, hyper-surveillance, forced evictions from lands and homes, rendering Palestinians as refugees within their own lands, and the use of the prison-industrial complex as a brutally efficient way of breaking up families, rupturing cultural transmission and sequestering Palestinians from their lands. The homicidal acts that attended the establishment of other settler states continue to play out today in the Palestinian occupied territories, with the Israeli state’s bombing of civilians and the obliteration of civilian infrastructure and the very ecologies that sustain Palestinian life. The violence of individual states is too often understood only within isolated national contexts. Yet, as evidenced above in our discussion of the Israeli settler state, this iterative violence must be seen as embedded within transnational relations of power that aim to secure similar goals across diverse geopolitical sites. Inspired by the Deathscapes project, the chapters and brief contributions brought together in the current volume collectively critique and counteract governmental, administrative and forensic accounts of racialized deaths across diverse states, from Abya Yala to Australia, and provide countermaps of state violence within a transnational and transhistorical frame.

Countermapping state violence The Deathscapes site connects the technological and ideological apparatus through which deaths in custody occur across places and across histories. Its aims are not only to document but also to provide the critical and analytical tools for understanding how deaths are understood and responded to. Rejecting the frequently dehumanizing terms of official inquiries and commissions, the site relies on the visual, narrative and poetic media of

Introduction  15 target communities themselves, drawing on, curating, relaying and amplifying the multifarious forms of witness-bearing, testimony and creative activism that are often ephemeral or unremarked. The site layers texts and images onto one another, deploying digital media to connect disparate stories and events. For example, the death of the Ngaanyatjarra elder, Mr Ward, who was scorched to death while being transported in a stifling prison van through the Western Australian desert, is mapped against a complex historical and spatial context that takes as its starting point a painting by an anonymous artist (Bui et al. 2017). The painting depicts a coffin travelling along a road cutting across a red desert landscape that is vertically scored by prison bars. Black hands grasp the bars, reflecting the perspective of Aboriginal spectators, themselves incarcerated, as they bear witness to the movement of this living coffin through their land. The image is suffused with the intense emotional impact of the violent death of their elder and leader on Ngaanyatjarra hearts and spirits. Cutting across the barred landscape that bears the traditional patterning of Ngaanyatjarra art is the horizontal slash of the road, the marker of invasion and colonisation, and of the imposition of missions, reserves and mines across the land. For many Ngaanyatjarra, the road is the means of removal away from Country to prison, just as for their grandparents the road was the means of removal from Country to missions as the land was cleared for petroleum exploration, weapons research, missile testing and even a “nature reserve.” Later, the military base was used as a site for the Woomera Detention Centre, where asylum seekers were held in exceptionally harsh conditions from 2000 to 2003. In the case study, a stark photograph, Welcome to Woomera by artist Rosemary Laing showing the Detention Centre encased in razor wire, is placed in visual connection with the prison bars that score the landscape of Ngaanyatjarra country in the anonymous painting. A third image, from the nineteenth century, of Aboriginal prisoners in neckchains and shackles being ferried to the prison on Rottnest Island, calls attention to the historical links between racialized punishment, island prisons and the evacuation of Indigenous land. As these images bring into view the carceral history and present on Ngaanyatjarra country, the case study simultaneously crosslinks Mr Ward’s scorching death in the prison van to deaths documented elsewhere on the Deathscapes site. It puts forward the concept of “necro-transport” in which the medium of transport for people in custody is deployed as the means of their death. Forms of necro-transport include deliberately faulty or unsafe equipment—leaky, overcrowded or sabotaged boats; shipping containers or trucks in which migrants are smuggled across borders—and transportation to conditions conducive to death, such as deportation to the lethal environment of offshore detention. Thus, Mr Ward’s death in the back of a prison van operated by the private agency SERCO is linked to other case studies,

16  Suvendrini Perera et al. such as “Every Boat is the First Boat” (Bui et al. 2020) on asylum seeker deaths at sea, and “Jimmy Mubenga and the Plane” (Yacoub and Franklin 2018), which documents the death of Angolan refugee Jimmy Mubenga at Heathrow Airport while in the process of being forcibly removed by G4S for deportation. In all of these case studies, the role of private security companies as agents of necro-transport is brought into view, as are the operations of the Military-Industrial-Border-Complex. In the Galleries section of the Deathscapes site, a sequence of photographs memorializes the vigil held for migrants who died or were injured in the process of transportation, such as the nine dead and nearly 30 people injured after being left without water in an unventilated tractor-trailer in a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, on July 23, 2017. The verbal and visual juxtapositions and multidimensional layerings across its rooms and passages may be described as the aesthetic infrastructure of the Deathscapes site. At times, its visual linkages across geographies and temporalities evoke works such as Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea. Referencing Vertigo Sea’s juxtapositions of contemporary refugee voyages and slave passages, Akomfrah speaks of the work’s desire to “erase certain kinds of borders”: Those that “delimit the ways in which certain kinds of identities can be brought together” (Akomfrah and Stierl 2016). To “delimit the ways in which certain kinds of identities can be brought together” is to impose a new set of border divides. In contrast, where the bringing together of “certain kinds of bodies” or identities makes visible underlying structures of racial capitalism and sovereign power, Akomfrah argues, “the blurring of boundaries and borders is in fact an ethical and an aesthetic strategy” (2017; see also Giannacopulos, this volume). The visual linkages of the Deathscapes site operate as an ethical and aesthetic strategy that links deaths in custody across the different state contexts, layering images and text and developing key categories that interweave across the case studies and other forms of analysis presented on the site, such as daily dispatches from coronial inquests of deaths in custody.

Combat breathing: The global deathscape In 2018, Deathscapes team presented daily dispatches from the inquest held for a 26-year-old Dunghutti man, David Dungay, who died in Sydney’s Long Bay jail after he was pinned down by the weight of five members of the prison’s Immediate Action Team (IAT) in the process of being forcibly transferred from one cell to another. The reason for his transfer was his refusal to stop eating a packet of biscuits in defiance of prison officers who were allegedly concerned about his blood sugar levels. Rather than removing the biscuit packet, prison authorities decided to move David Dungay by force from his cell. In the video of this operation, he can be heard crying out 12 times: “I can’t breathe”: the same desperate plea made by Eric Garner as he was placed in a prohibited chokehold that would prove fatal

Introduction  17 by New York City police officers in 2014. Standing in solidarity with the Dungay family at the inquest, Black Lives Matter leader Hawk Newsome told the media: It’s the same story, different soil. It’s the same thing from Long Bay to the USA. In Sydney, his name is David Dungay. In New York City, his name is Eric Garner. Eric Garner called for his life 11 times. David Dungay called for his life 12 times. These eerie similarities cannot go ignored. (Pugliese 2018) In London, almost a decade earlier, 46-year-old Jimmy Mubenga was heard to cry out the same last words as Eric Garner and David Dungay before his death, forcibly strapped into the seat of a plane at Heathrow Airport in 2010 as G4S attempted to deport him to Angola (Yacoub and Franklin 2018). Nadine El-Enany describes the contractors’ “use of a banned restraint technique which obstructed breathing, that of ‘Carpet Karaoke’” to hold Mubenga down in his seat, despite the risk of positional asphyxia: According to the coroner’s report, this is a ‘technique adopted for controlling disruptive deportees in an aircraft seat. It comprised pushing a deportee’s head downwards so that any noise that he or she made would be projected towards the door (“singing to the carpet”) and not through the plane upsetting the passengers or causing the captain to require disembarkation (so aborting the removal)’. (El Enany 2015, 14) Several passengers testified to hearing Mubenga’s last utterance as G4S contractors held him face down in his seat: I can’t breathe. The killing of Jimmy Mubenga is here scripted as a murderous public performance—“Carpet Karaoke”—that can be conducted in plain sight as long as the victim dies in silence: “singing to the carpet” so as not to upset his fellow passengers and thus cause the inconvenience of an aborted flight. Mubenga’s killing is of a piece with all the other racialized deaths executed in public spaces with a sense of a performative impunity on the part of the murderers. The postmortem finding of “positional asphyxia,” which marks the medico-legal causative factor of all these deaths, speaks to a larger causal factor unintended by forensic agents of the state. It effectively refers to the institutionalized racist structures of state violence that literally crush and suffocate their victims with a sense of impunity in the everyday public spaces of civilian life: a suburban road, a plane aisle or a city sidewalk. It was not until mid-2020, as George Floyd’s life was crushed out of him on a Minneapolis street, that the same expiring cry brought the Black Lives

18  Suvendrini Perera et al. Matter movement to mainstream global attention. Yet, BLM was always a global movement in its orientation. Speaking in Sydney in 2017, Patrice Cullors and Rodney Diverlus affirmed, When we started Black Lives Matter, we understood that this movement wasn’t just for the United States but one that would centre black communities around the globe. We don’t see this as …. relegated to the United States but as a human rights movement which allows us to have a broader conversation about anti-black racism across the globe. (2017) Jimmy Mubenga strapped into an aeroplane seat for forcible deportation from Heathrow; Eric Garner in a fatal choke-hold in New York city; David Dungay in a jail cell in Sydney; George Floyd on a pavement in Minneapolis: Black, Indigenous and migrant subjects across three countries. The same desperate cry in the face of lethal practices of the state and its agents. In an essay written two decades ago, we attempted to bring into focus what can be seen, retrospectively, to inscribe all of the deaths above—Eric Garner, Jimmy Mubenga, David Dungay, George Floyd—and many more. We referenced Frantz Fanon’s piercing words on combat breathing: There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured … under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed breathing. It is a combat breathing. Frantz Fanon (1970, 50) Combat breathing unforgettably embodies the last words of so many victims of state violence. David Dungay, Eric Garner, Jimmy Mubenga and George Floyd: all repeatedly uttered these desperate words —“I can’t breathe!”—as they were physically crushed by the full weight of the repressive operatives of the state. Introducing our 2001 edited special volume Combat Breathing, on transnational state violence, we wrote: Strange intimacy of state violence: as apparatus, as technology, it is other to the body that is its target. And yet, even as it comes from the outside, even as it maintains its pain-inflicting exteriority, it intimately interpenetrates the very somatic fibres of its target, amplifying its wounding effects across the body to the point that it reduces the subject to a state of combat breathing. From the moment we first encountered this extraordinary Fanonian term, we were haunted by it. In Fanon’s meditation on the violence of the colonial state, the subject who is on the receiving end of state violence is positioned in the

Introduction  19 fraught, traumatic and potentially fatal exercise of ‘combat breathing’. Combat breathing names the mobilisation of the target subject’s life energies merely to continue to live, to breathe and to survive the exercise of state violence. (Perera and Pugliese 2001, 1) The chapters that constitute the fabric of this book evidence the ongoing transnational regime of combat breathing as unleashed by different settler states. They delineate the harrowed deathscapes of combat breathing, the daily pulsation that disfigures its targets and that kills its victims; and they give voice to that ensemble of agents who, through tactics of contestation, creativity and resistance, are working collectively at the abolition of these deathscapes.

Important note on accessing the Deathscapes site The Deathscapes site is accessible live at www.Deathscapes.org. The site is permanently archived by the National Library of Australia and is accessible at https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20201103065140/ http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/173410/20201103-1648/www.deathscapes. org/index.html

References Akomfrah John, and Maurice Stierl. 2016. Border/Talks: A Conversation with John Akomfrah on Sea-Migration, Borders, and Art. Sept. 20, 2016. https:// youtu.be/YJjkNl-tvzs (accessed 1 June 2021). Birch, Tony. 2001. The Last Refuge of the ‘UnAustralian’. The UTS Review 7.1, 17–22. Blight, David W. 2017. Frederick Douglass, Refugee. The Atlantic February 7. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/frederick-douglassrefugee/515853/ (accessed 1 July 2021). Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider, and Charandev Singh. 2018. Extraterritorial Killings: The Weaponisation of Bodies. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https:// www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/case-study-4-extraterritorial-killings-theweaponisation-of-bodies (accessed 15 July 2021). Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, and Charandev Singh. 2017. The Road: Passage through the Deathscape. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ the-road-passage-through-the-deathscape (accessed 15 July 2021). Bui, Michelle, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider, and Charandev Singh. Every Boat Is the First Boat. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States, 2020. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/every-boat-isthe-first-boat (accessed 15 July 2021). Cobb, Jelani. 2018. Juneteenth and the Detention of Children in Texas, The New Yorker June 19. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/juneteenthand-the-detention-of-children-in-texas (accessed 2 July 2021).

20  Suvendrini Perera et al. Coombs, Gretchen. 2019. An Online Project Documents Settler Violence around the World. Hyperallergic November 14. https://hyperallergic.com/528400/ deathscapes-australian-online-project/ (accessed 1 June 2021). Cullors, Patrisse, and Rodney Diverlus. 2017. Black Lives Matter in Australia: Wherever Black People Are, There Is Racism – And resistance. The Guardian November 2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/02/black-livesmatter-in-australia-wherever-black-people-are-there-is-racism-and-resistance (accessed 15 October 2019). De Genoa, Nicholas. 2018. The “Migrant Crisis” as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe? Ethnic and Racial Studies 41.10, 1765–1782. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01419870.2017.1361543 Deer, Sarah. 2010. Relocation Revisited: Sex Trafficking of Native Women in the United States, William Mitchell Law Review 821. http://open.mitchellhamline. edu/facsch/157 El-Enany, Nadine. 2015. The Violence of Deportation and the Exclusion of Evidence of Racism in the Case of Jimmy Mubenga. In Justice, Resistance and Solidarity: Race and Policing in England and Wales eds. Nadine El-Enany and Eddie Bruce-Jones. London: Runnymede, 14–15. http://www.runnymedetrust. org/uploads/Race%20and%20Policing%20v5.pdf (accessed 12 August 2020). Fanon, Frantz. 1970. A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. Ringwood, VI: Pelican. Franklin, M. I., and Raed Yacoub. 2017. Alan Kurdi and the Boat. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies. https://www.deathscapes.org/ case-studies/alan-kurdi-and-the-boat (accessed 15 March 2021). Hughes, Shaheen. 2020. Write What Should Not Be Forgotten. Medium. June 19. https://medium.com/@shaheen.hughes/write-what-should-not-be-forgottenc12875698351 (accessed 15 July 2020). Hunt, Sarah. 2010. Colonial Roots, Contemporary Risk Factors: A Cautionary Exploration of the Domestic Trafficking of Aboriginal Women and Girls in British Columbia, Canada. Alliance News 33 (July), 27–31. https://www.gaatw.org/ publications/Alliance%20News/Alliance_News_July_2010.pdf Inda, Jonathan Xavier. 2018a. Letting Moises Die: Perishing in Immigration Detention. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www. deathscapes.org/case-studies/punished-to-death-perishing-in- immigrationdetention/ (accessed 2 June 2021) ———. 2018b. Trauma on the Body: The Border Killing of Anastasio Hernández Rojas. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www. deathscapes.org/case-studies/trauma-on-the-body/ (accessed 1 June 2021). Indigenous Social Justice Association [ISJA]. 2021. “Over 200 Migrants to Receive Aboriginal Passports.” 1 September, Media Release. Maldonado, Beatriz Esmeralda. 2019. “I’m Not Faking!”: Abandoned to Death in a Prison Cell. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https:// www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/im-not-faking-abandoned-to-death-in-aprison-cell-inprogress/?preview_id=19222&preview_nonce=19dcac3e7b&_ thumbnail_id=19223&preview=true (accessed 1 June 2021). Masalha, Nur. 2007. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine. New York: Zed Books. Perera, Suvendrini and Joseph Pugliese. 2001. Introduction. Combat Breathing: State Violence and the Body in Question. Somatechnics 1.1, 1–14.

Introduction  21 ———. 2015. Dgadi-Dugarang: Talk Loud, Talk Strong: A Tribute to Aboriginal leader Uncle Ray Jackson 1941–2015. Borderlands 14.1. https://webarchive.nla. gov.au/awa/20160515034348/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/30280/201807290000/www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol14no1.html ———. 2018. Between Spectacle and Secret: The Politics of Non-Visibility and the Performance of Incompletion. In Visualizing Human Rights ed. Jane Lydon. Perth: UWA Press, 85–99. ———. 2020. In an Impaired State: Settler Racial Logic and Prosthetic Citizenship in Australia. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 33, 477–494. DOI 10.1007/s10767-020-09354-8. Pugliese, Joseph. 2015. Geopolitics of Aboriginal Sovereignty: Colonial Law as ‘a Species of Excess of Its Own Authority’, Aboriginal Passport Ceremonies and Asylum Seekers’. Law Text Culture 19, 84–115. ———. 2018. A Series of Daily Dispatches from the Coronial Inquest Currently Underway in Sydney for Mr David Dungay, Dunghutti Warrior. Deathscapes Engagements. https://www.deathscapes.org/engagements/dispatch-sydney/ (accessed 1 June 2021). Refugee Action Coalition. 2012. Aboriginal Passports Issued to Indefinitely Detained Tamils, Denied Australian Residency on ‘Security’ Grounds. 13 May. http://www.refugeeaction.org.au/?p=1755 (accessed 1 June 2021). Silverstein, Jordy. 2019. Mapping Deaths in Custody to Dismantle Carceral Logic. Overland January 30. https://overland.org.au/2019/01/mapping-deaths-in-custodyto-dismantle-carceral-logic/ (accessed 1 June 2021) Speed, Shannon. 2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in Settler-Capitalist State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8.4, 387–409. Yacoub, R., and Franklin M. I. 2018. Jimmy Mubenga and the Plane, Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies. https://www.deathscapes.org/ case-studies/jimmy-mubenga-case-study/ (accessed 1 June 2021). Yacoub, R., and Franklin, M. I. 2019. Yarl’s Wood – Death by Indefinite Detention, Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies. https://www. deathscapes.org/case-studies/yarls-wood/ (accessed 1 June 2021).

Part I

Deathscapes intersectionalities

Overview Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

Figure Part I.1 Saying Their Names, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia, June 2020. Installation in solidarity with George Floyd protests. Photo: Anonymous. Reproduced with permission.

The three chapters in this section expand on some of the core concepts and features of the Deathscapes site and draw out their theoretical implications from different disciplinary locations. In Chapter 1, Patricia Hill Collins builds on her distinguished body of work on intersectionality and Black feminist thought to consider violence as “a core mechanism that facilitates interconnections among systems of power.” She makes the key argument that “because violence is simultaneously specific and universal, it provides an important site for analyzing the organization and dynamics of intersecting power relations.” Collins identifies the Deathscapes site, with its documentation of multiple case studies of state violence perpetrated against DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-3

Deathscapes intersectionalities  25 disparate groups, as providing a framework for understanding the “patterned nature of violence” and how seemingly disparate experiences of violence are in fact interconnected. Taking as her starting point the Deathscapes case study “At a Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms Dhu,” (Bui et al. 2017) Collins identifies how the case study not only documents the lethal factors that intersected to produce Ms Dhu’s death in custody but, in conjunction with other case studies on the site, enables an analysis through which it is possible to perceive how “disparate cases of lethal intersections … are themselves interconnected.” Thus, the Deathscapes site as archive “positions those affected by violence to develop analyses of how political domination of intersecting systems of power works.” A critical feature of Collins’ commentary is her recognition of the importance of centring experiences of the dead, their families and communities in the articulation of an “anti-violence praxis” that refuses a top-down approach: As a form of critical inquiry and praxis, intersectionality needs to be constructed on the scaffold of anti-violence initiatives, not just on a careful reading of how elites wield power. Viewing violence as hegemonic and omnipotent can frame small actions to resist it as ineffectual and doomed to failure. But conceptualizing anti-violence initiatives as resisting the violence engendered by a specific lethal intersection invites new questions concerning the types of ideas and actions that oppose violence. Several Deathscapes case studies close with “walls” of community memorials, artworks or protests that emphasize the collective and the coalitional. As Collins notes, in its marking and collating these small embodied responses, the site “broadens the community of practitioners as well as the knowledge they create as a way of doing intersectional analysis.” In Chapter 2, Maria Giannacopoulos too explores the Deathscapes site’s implications as “both archive and methodology.” As it archives the case studies of Indigenous deaths, the Deathscapes site provides the evidentiary ground for what Giannacopoulos names “the debtscape”: that is, “the foundational debt” of the Australian state to its Indigenous subjects, “incurred through frontier violence, dispossessing land removals and the imposition of a British legal and political order.” This debt, which continues to accrue in the present, is continually obfuscated, Giannacopoulos argues, through the framework of a colonial law that disavows its own colonial status, presenting itself rather as singular, sovereign and above the fray: a “nomopoly.” The deaths documented on the Deathscapes site are decisive refutations of this nomopoly. They reveal, rather, the systemic and constitutive violence of Australian law as it continues to produce and sanction lethal forms of racialized violence. As the case studies on the Deathscapes site provide a living counter-archive to the nomopoly of Australian colonial law, revealing its ongoing violence

26 Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese towards the Indigenous and refugee bodies who disturb its sovereign authority, the site also offers, Giannacopoulos argues, “a way of writing critical race history.” Drawing on the work of David Garland, she identifies Deathscapes’ genealogical approach as a form of “history of the present”: the burden assumed by Deathscapes in generating a body of evidence of global state violence is a form of writing history in the present by engaging boldly with “forces active in the present” within “a field of power relations and political struggle” (Garland 2014, 373). Because of this approach, Deathscapes has a profound pedagogical function. As a scholar teaching “effectively against the criminological grain,” Giannacopoulos expands on the Deathscapes site’s implications for an approach that locates crime in systems of power rather than as individual acts—for example, the death in custody of Ms Dhu after her arrest for unpaid fines. As Giannacopoulos marks, “the Deathscapes project provides an evidentiary ground for showing how settler colonial states systematically violate targeted populations … at and with the borders.” Our own chapter, with which this section concludes, focuses on how women in immigration detention are systematically targeted for violence “at and with the border.” The chapter focuses on practices of gender and sexual violence towards women held in immigration detention in two settler colonial states, Australia and the United States. This violence, we argue, must be understood through a genealogical approach, and through an analysis of how similar, if often also different, colonial histories both inform and continue to shape contemporary regimes of detention. Our argument is that the border is a site where these forms of intersectional violence are concentrated and licensed. We signal a number of the axes along which the treatment of illegalized arrivals not only functions to reproduce ongoing forms of settler colonial violence but also ramifies and mutates into new formations: practices that reinscribe formative patterns of racialized punishment directed at enslaved and colonized Indigenous peoples. The technologies and practices of both slavery and continuing Indigenous dispossession, we argue, stage their historical returns in certain practices of immigration detention. The chapter leads into the next part of the volume, which focuses on violence against Indigenous women.

References Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2017. “At a Lethal Intersection: the killing of Ms Dhu.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ms-dhu. Garland, David. 2014. “What is a ‘history of the present’? On Foucault’s Genealogies and their Critical Preconditions.” Punishment & Society 16(4): 365–384.

1

Violence and intersecting power relations Patricia Hill Collins

Violence provides a rich entry point for analysing intersecting power relations. The pervasiveness of violent actions and speech suggests that violence is not just an “add-on” to racism, heteropatriarchy and similar systems of power but rather is essential for each system’s distinctive organizational practices. Gender oppression relies on practices of rape and domestic violence, racial oppression rests on lynching and state-sanctioned terrorism, sexual oppression draws on hate crimes against LGBTQ people, and nationalism has long been associated with the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities. Practices such as these reveal how force constitutes an essential feature of political domination. Yet violence also requires interpretive contexts whose purpose is to solicit cooperation from elites and subordinated groups alike. These connections between power relations, violent acts and the ideas that explain violence reappear within racism, heteropatriarchy and nationalism. Yet since the 1990s, the emerging discourse of intersectionality posits that systems of power are interlocking, interdependent or intersecting, e.g., racism gains meaning through sexism, and colonialism is tightly linked to capitalism (Collins and Bilge 2020 [2016]). Conceptualizing intersecting power relations as mutually constructing suggests that, just as systems of power are increasingly conceptualized as intersectional, violence may be similarly intersectional. In other words, there is no such thing as “pure” racial violence or “pure” gender violence. Instead, the violence that characterizes political domination is both intersectional and essential to the workings of intersecting systems of power (Collins 2019, 237–240). This essay explores this relationship between intersectional analyses of violence and the organization of intersecting power relations. It does so by focusing on patterned connections among specific cases of violence, or lethal intersections, where death or the threat of death is prominent. Here, I adopt the term lethal intersection from a case study on one such case (see Bui et al. 2017) on the Deathscapes site to describe how multiple forms of oppression converge to catalyse a particular set of violent practices that fall more heavily on particular groups such as Black people, Indigenous people, women, the young, poor people, immigrants and LBGTQ people.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-4

28  Patricia Hill Collins A rich body of knowledge about violence and its lethal intersections currently exists, primarily because feminists, anti-racist activists, journalists, community organizers, researchers and practitioners in education, health care and social work have grappled with violence as a harmful social practice. Armed with awareness of the scope and dynamics of violence as a social problem, activists and scholars working within diverse anti-violence projects have elevated awareness of how violence as a social problem differentially affects people across race, class, gender, age and nation as categories of analysis. On first glance, cases of lethal intersections may appear to be primarily about one form of oppression over others, for example, lynching as indicative of racial oppression or rape of gender oppression. Yet a closer look at these practices reveals their intersectional contours (Collins 2004, 215– 245). Certainly, the globe is awash with seemingly incomprehensible violent acts and patterned practices that, in the absence of analyses of power can seem random, individualized and senseless. Higher rates of maternal and infant mortality for mothers in poor countries, deaths in custody of journalists who uncover government corruption, bodies of African immigrants that wash up on Mediterranean beaches or the deaths from gun violence that disproportionately target young people of colour in the United States seemingly constitute disparate practices. But when recontextualized within a broader context of intersecting power relations, these examples of violence can be seen as lethal intersections that illuminate the centrality of violence in political domination. In other words, violence constitutes a core mechanism that facilitates interconnections among systems of power and lethal intersections provide a navigational tool for analysing these connections.

Violence as patterned lethal intersections Violence can be a catalyst for analysis and social action that goes far beyond a specific violent act. Different expressions of violence fall more heavily on Black people, Indigenous people, women, immigrant populations, religious minorities, LGBTQ people and young people because they are differentially placed within intersecting systems of power. People who experience political domination are both differently vulnerable to varying forms of violence and also have differing experiences with violence. It is no accident that differently oppressed groups criticize the violence that they encounter and, as a result of their analyses, organize to resist the specific expressions of violence that inform their everyday lives. Much of this bottom-up analysis is implicitly intersectional, often without recognizing itself as such. In other words, political resistance to racism or sexism often begins in response to experiences with violence associated with one form of oppression. But it rarely stops there. Ironically, narratives advanced by elite actors routinely overemphasize what they see as violence associated with subordinated groups while

Violence and intersecting power relations  29 ignoring and/or or erasing their own culpability in condoning violence as members of dominant groups. Whether science, popular culture or government reports, dominant discourse depicts subordinated groups as either initiating violence or as being so threatening that they require disciplinary violence to keep them in their place. This discourse of blaming the victims of violence for the violence within a given society runs deep. Men who kill their girlfriends, wives, sisters or daughters, especially those who try to leave abusive relationships, send a chilling message to women and girls who are considering a similar decision. Trans-women and trans-men who by their visibility challenge gender norms become targets of hate crimes and unsolved murders. A Black teenager walking home from the store in his racially integrated, middle-class neighbourhood can be killed by a white neighbour who perceives him as a threat. Elderly Asians are pushed to the ground and maligned during the Covid pandemic. Excuses for the violence targeted towards less powerful people are everywhere: “If she hadn’t threatened to leave me, I wouldn’t have needed to kill her”; or “if they simply blended in as men or women, they would not have provoked me”; or “if that Black teenager had just followed my orders, I wouldn’t have shot him”; or “if those Chinese immigrants had not invaded our country, we wouldn’t need to chase them away.” Murdering women, killing trans-people, shooting unarmed Black teenagers and harassing people of Asian descent set chilling examples for all women, LGBTQ people, Black people, young people and racialized ethnic groups who seemingly question authority by their very presence. In this context, the threat of resistance to prevailing power hierarchies typically provokes more powerful social actors to turn to violence, not the other way around. From the perspective of dominant groups, subordinated groups must be contained in order to protect those in power from the threat that subordinated groups seemingly present. When elite actors punish small acts of defiance by members of subordinate groups, they aim to suppress dissent and rebellion within contexts that are socially unjust. The reaction to small rebellions by individuals can be far out of line with the actual threat, and such retaliatory violence is routinely sanctioned by major social institutions. In the United States, for example, 90 years of deadly force used against African Americans beginning in the waning days of Reconstruction (1877) and lasting through the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965) reflects voter suppression initiatives that aimed to disenfranchise Black citizens. In Southern states, small infractions or even benign behaviour by Black individuals has been met by excessive force by both police and private citizens. Similarly, women’s protracted struggles for reproductive rights in the United States have been met with violence and intimidation. In the 1980s, doctors who performed abortions faced death threats and women’s health clinics that offered abortions were routinely bombed. The majority of women using these clinics were poor women, young women, with clinic clients disproportionately women of colour.

30  Patricia Hill Collins Because these power relationships of race, gender and class require the continual application of force, the political domination that they uphold is inherently unstable. Subordinated groups see violence as an illegitimate use of force that is designed to foster their submission. Despite the dangers of retaliatory violence by more powerful social actors and groups, violence can have the unintended consequence of mobilizing social action among Black people, Latinos, women, LGBTQ people and immigrant groups not just against specific violent acts but also against the power relations that violence upholds. Subordinated groups have long offered alternative explanations for their own use of force as self-defence against racial, gender, sexual and national violence within fundamentally unjust social systems. Subordinated groups have also turned to violence when other forms of protest were blocked or inadequate (Fanon 1963). Moreover, because violence has been a core social problem for subordinated people across categories of race, gender, sexuality and nation, the pervasiveness of violence offers a window into why such groups would advance intersectional analyses of political domination. The term intersectionality invokes this ongoing effort by subordinated groups to address the social problem of violence that they confront. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” that is widely credited with introducing the term itself, argues that solving the social problem of violence targeted towards women of colour in the United States requires new political responses (Crenshaw 1991). Criticizing the limitations of race-only or gender-only analyses of violence, Crenshaw introduces the term intersectionality as a solution to the limits of monocategorical thinking. In doing so, she both invokes and expands on analyses of Black feminism (Collins 2000) and Latina feminism (Collins 2019, 138–139) to include the challenges facing immigrant women of colour. Crenshaw’s immediate concern was to strengthen anti-violence mobilization within grassroots and public policy venues. She did not set out to name a field of inquiry but rather to solve a social problem by extending intersectional paradigms as part of a strategy to resist violence.1 Crenshaw’s work draws from a longstanding tradition of African American women’s analyses of violence where a similar path towards increasingly complex intersectional analyses informed Black feminist thought (Collins 2019, 158–167). Enslaved Black women recognized that they faced particular forms of violence whose combination was often lethal because they were both Black and women. Practices of physical and emotional abuse such as sexual assault, forced childbearing and family separation catalysed the sobering realization that race-only or gender-only analyses of captivity could produce neither freedom from slavery nor the full benefits of American citizenship afterward. Given the widespread tendency to erase, ignore, minimize and dismiss the violence that was targeted to African American women, Black feminist thought developed deepening intersectional

Violence and intersecting power relations  31 analyses that grappled with the changing contours of violence on Black women bodies and resistance to it. Black feminist thought constitutes one important site where Black women have made such lethal intersections visible. Doing so in the United States required moving beyond binary frames of so-called divided loyalties, namely, of being either Black or a woman, to advance a both/and analytical framework of being both Black and women. Other groups grapple with their own patterned lethal intersections with the violence of political domination that in turn catalyse distinctive resistant knowledge traditions, for example, Aboriginal responses to the violence of settler colonialism. Each lethal intersection provides a provocative framework for analysing the contours and effects of violence. But each particular lethal intersection, at best, can only yield a partial perspective on violence. Yet these seemingly disparate projects provide distinctive angles of vision on the particularities of each discrete lethal intersection as well as their possible interconnections. Tracing intersecting power relations through the web of lethal intersections resists the tendency to analyse such intersectionality within categories of nation-state policy, or colonialism or heteropatriarchy. Patterns of lethal intersections provide another structure for analysing intersecting power relations, which draws from these and other systems but is not contained by them.

Violence as a catalyst for intersectional analyses The growing recognition of the need for collaboration and coalition politics to address violence as a social problem can facilitate a deepening sensibility about potential connections among diverse anti-violence projects. Front-line actors who are committed to resisting racism, heterosexism, nationalism and capitalism both within and among diverse communities provide important intellectual leadership in defining the contours of violence within their own projects as well as with similar projects. The particular lethal intersections within the sightlines of Black people, women, poor people, LGBTQ people, racial/ethnic groups, religious minorities, immigrant groups and similarly subordinated groups provide a vocabulary for mapping the contours of violence as they see it as well as how patterns of lethal intersections might deepen understanding of intersecting power relations. Significantly, it is crucial that those who are involved in anti-violence praxis are seen as intellectual leaders in fostering such conversations both inside the communities of subordinated groups as well as among individuals with shared social justice sensibilities. For a variety of reasons, this is hard to do. For one, cultivating much-needed internal dialogues within affected communities requires mechanisms to come to terms with intra-community violence. Developing such mechanisms remains difficult because they often involve contentious conversations that “air dirty laundry” by challenging taken-for-granted frameworks within subordinated communities. Take,

32  Patricia Hill Collins for example, Kathy Cohen’s analyses of how homophobia within African American communities compromises anti-racist politics (Cohen 1999). Cohen’s work unsettles assumed gender and sexual hierarchies within African American politics by highlighting how sexuality plays an important role in lethal intersections within African American communities. Her analysis draws on deepening intersectional frameworks within Black feminism that identify how Black politics would remain compromised by focusing on violence against Black men to the exclusion of Black women. Significantly, this struggle for independent analyses within African American communities typically occurs within a broader political and interpretive context that blames Black people for violence within Black communities. Analysing violence within subordinated communities thus walks a fine line between developing open and honest conversations about the culpability of group members for violence in their midst and reifying longstanding racial tropes that depict Black people as biologically or culturally violent. Developing a progressive Black sexual politics requires analysing how the intersection of racism and heteropatriarchy (patriarchy and heterosexism) help explain patterns of violence within African American communities (Collins 2004). These internal challenges within groups also confront the external challenge of building coalitions with similar like-minded groups, for example, among Black people, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Muslim groups in the United States. The tragedy of racism is that many poor and working-class white people cannot see the similarities of their material realities and those of people of colour. But the potential for making common cause among racially subordinated groups requires rewriting how their distinctive experiences with US citizenship as well as with labour history stem from common causes (Glenn 2002). This kind of bottom-up, anti-violence theorizing and activism from subordinated groups requires recognizing how particular expressions of violence visited upon one’s own group differ from those targeted to others. For example, Indigenous scholars and activists have detailed longstanding and contemporary patterns of Indigenous resistance across the borders of the United States and Canada as settler states (Simpson 2014), Indigenous activism in defence of tradition and the environment (Estes 2019), and analyses of Indigenous resistance as radical resistance (Simpson 2017). A solid body of revisionist African American history, much of it done by Black scholars, has identified a host of themes, among them, the history of Constitutional racism in the United States (Berry 1994), revisionist analyses of Black activism that highlight the radical democratic vision of Black women activists (Ransby 2003), and treatments of Black migration from 1915 to 1970 that align this major historical phenomenon with broader migration and refugee literature (Wilkerson 2010). These distinctive projects of reinterpreting separate histories have been supplemented by projects that examine coalitions that are already in place, such as Black–Brown alliances, but that have been neglected in scholarly work (Marquez 2013).

Violence and intersecting power relations  33 The growing recognition of these and other shared experiences in the United States reflects a deepening awareness of how differential experiences with violence within this one national context are interconnected. Historically, and by design, differential use of white supremacist ideologies and tailored practices of domination has made intertwining Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian and immigrant experiences difficult to see. For example, Indigenous youth have been denied tools of critical literacy that would enable them to develop self-defined analyses of oppression. Governmental policies implemented genocidal polices towards Indigenous peoples, initially through state-sanctioned violence that killed people and through assimilation policies that removed Indigenous youth from their families and placed them within Native schools. For Black youth, the legacy of racial segregation has persistently underfunded Black schools. These historical differences in the treatment of Indigenous and Black youth reflect distinctive histories with settler colonialism and slavery that crafted and implemented public policies of forced assimilation for these and other groups. Indigenous and Black youth are differentially vulnerable to lethal intersections. Increasingly, historically subordinated groups who may have interpreted their local histories as unique have increasingly come to see how their experiences with violence are interconnected with those of other groups. Specifically, experiences with violence foster disparate cases of lethal intersections that are themselves interconnected. Understanding these varying histories from the standpoints of those who live them is essential in building a transversal politics that is simultaneously local and global (Collins 2017). New global communications technologies that facilitate the free flow of information among groups present new possibilities for antiviolence projects to expand coalition-building with other similarly affected groups. Such technologies have created new possibilities and conversations among intellectuals and activists in local, grassroots anti-violence initiatives, web-based archival projects, traditional academic venues, investigative journalism, health care professions, criminal justice reformers and all others who are touched by violence to network and inform one another’s analysis and political projects. Not only are coalitions possible—but, if the global networking among activist groups that preceded the 2020 global social protests against racism are any indication—coalitional politics are well under-way (Collins and Bilge 2020 [2016], 139–165). The Deathscapes project featured in this volume constitutes one such coalitional project that investigates the practices and technologies, both global and domestic, that characterize state violence against Black, Indigenous and similarly racialized groups across settler states such as Australia, the United States and Canada. As such, it illustrates the connections between violence as a catalyst for intersectional analysis and the centrality of addressing violence as a social problem within social justice projects. The Deathscapes project maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres and, through this

34  Patricia Hill Collins archive, documents state actions, as well as the lack of state investigation and, in some cases, the culpability of the state itself in fostering needless deaths of racialized peoples, Indigenous people and refugees. By assembling case studies on the lives of individuals whose experiences with violence and death are typically ignored and forgotten, the project links individual cases to one another as well as to broader processes of state-sanctioned violence. Each case is unique, reflecting the individuality of one life that was lost. Each person left others behind to mourn the loss, with many of those left behind becoming advocates for the missing and/or dead. By highlighting the lives and humanity of those who went missing or who died, the Deathscapes project resists public apathy towards the treatment of women, poor people and people of colour and criticizes the inadequate state responses to disappearances and deaths of individuals from oppressed groups. Documenting the disappearance and death of one human being illuminates patterns of violence that converged in that person’s life but that are far from unique to that individual. Each specific case illuminates different aspects of intersecting systems of power. Take, for example, the case entitled “At a Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms. Dhu” (Bui et al. 2018), the Deathscapes case that inspired this paper. Ms. Dhu’s social location within intersecting power relations made her especially vulnerable to violence. Ms. Dhu was female, young, Aboriginal and poor within Australia, a white settler society. The forms of violence in her life followed predictable paths that reflected intersecting axes of power. Ms. Dhu experienced beatings from a partner who was 17 years her senior, a form of domestic abuse that is the hallmark of gender-based violence. When she sought help from the police, she was arrested and detained for prior unpaid fines. While incarcerated, she developed an infection yet was denied medical care. She died in custody. Ms. Dhu’s death demonstrates the significance of state-sanctioned neglect, in this case, the state’s failure to save her life, as a violent action. In this regard, Ms. Dhu was one of many young Aboriginal people who find themselves subject to the authority of an array of coercive state agencies in nation-states who use force against segments of their citizens (Collins and Bilge 2020 [2016], 152–159). Her death illustrates the convergence of factors that individually might have harmed her, the intersection of actions and inactions, but that collectively were lethal. Violence is effective when force or the threat of death suppresses people’s ability to resist political domination. Significantly, Ms. Dhu’s death also illustrates the impact of violence on those left behind. The suffering of being forced to witness violence targeted towards a loved one or to be left wondering about those who go missing can have lifelong effects. The effects of violence outlive the specific life or violent act—those who mourn her loss, who feel pain by remembering her and by witnessing her death over and over again when other young women like Ms. Dhu are murdered or senselessly die. This intergenerational trauma of violence can be an effective tool of political domination that reaches into the heart of families and communities.

Violence and intersecting power relations  35 But witnessing or carrying memories of violence can also have an opposite effect. In this case, those left behind refused to let Ms. Dhu’s death go unnoticed. Through memorials held on her behalf and the creation of the case itself within the Deathscapes project, those left behind ensured that her death would not be just another invisible death of an Indigenous woman or woman of colour whose death was mourned privately and silently. Her advocates refused to let people forget the circumstances of Ms. Dhu’s life or death. This case study acknowledges how people who are left behind when someone they love is killed refuse to forget, often no matter how much they try. Ms. Dhu’s death catalysed a common reaction of speaking up and speaking out against her death and those that follow similar patterns. When individuals refuse to forget, their actions keep these issues alive, even if they lose in the here and now. Their memories build cultural continuity that is the bedrock of social movement action. As long as people are killed or die needlessly, this kind of social movement activism will persist. This intergenerational trauma of violence can be an effective tool of political mobilization for social change. The case study method of the Deathscapes project models an important form of coalitional politics that brings intellectual work into closer alignment with the emotional, analytical and political elements of both grassroots political organizing and global social movements. It is a valuable tool for bringing people together, both through its organizational practices of building a local community of people who are harmed by violence, as well

Figure 1.1 “The Struggle for Justice Continues.” Screenshot from Deathscapes case study, “At a Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms Dhu.”

36  Patricia Hill Collins as sharing the results of that self-defined analysis with broader constituencies. The case study of Ms. Dhu is sensitive to the need for personal healing and the archive overall offers a much-needed platform for collective mourning. Yet the Deathscapes project also provides an important angle of vision on anti-violence praxis. For this project, the first step in preparing for a broader dialogue about violence is to document and honour the experiences of the affected individual. The project models an archaeological methodology that identifies cases of lethal intersections, excavates key aspects of each case, continues to develop each case and develops the archives of cases by adding new ones and revising existing ones. No case is ever “closed” because people contribute to it over time. In this way, the Deathscapes project cultivates a living archive of violence that resembles the social science methodology of participatory action research. Such research broadens the community of practitioners as well as the knowledge they create as a way of doing intersectional analysis (Collins and Bilge 2020 [2016], 68–69). But it also rests on a philosophy of participatory democracy that resists political domination by developing intellectual communities for each case among people with varying forms of expertise. What initially begins by documenting one case of racial violence or gender violence over time deepens as more systems of power come into view for explaining the same case. Moreover, archiving these cases positions those affected by violence to develop analyses of how political domination of intersecting systems of power works. A clearer view of particular lethal intersections, such as those presented in the Deathscapes project, deepens understanding of the patterned nature of violence and its culpability in shaping intersecting power relations. Significantly, the Deathscapes project is one of many of social justice projects that resist violence by (1) conceptualizing the violence associated with racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and nationalism as intersectional; and (2) cultivating practices of linking local social justice projects within a broader global context of intersecting power relations. Reflecting differences of time, location, culture, nation, resources and other aspects of the organization of power itself, anti-violence social action has trended towards intersectional analysis and collaborative forms of political praxis. The Deathscapes project is itself a living archive of dialogues among the various cases. How might the point of view from the Deathscapes project and similar initiatives that rest on a similar methodological approach be placed in dialogue? Together this ever-growing archive of cases of lethal intersections illuminates a pattern that suggests how multiple systems of power assemble and reassemble in predictable ways to ensure political domination.

Routinized violence and disciplinary power One major challenge of resisting violence is that violence can be so routinized as to be invisible. Violent acts may be so ubiquitous that they may not

Violence and intersecting power relations  37 be conceptualized as violence at all. In some social locations, seeing men who beat their wives or homeless people dying on the streets of rich countries is part of the fabric of everyday life. This routinized, institutionalized violence, whether organized through families, communities, organizations or the state, can be deeply embedded in public policies and social structures. Take, for example, the familiar demographic reality in the United States where babies who are born to mothers who are poor, Black, Indigenous and Latina die at higher rates during their first year of life than babies born to middle-class, white women. Viewing differential rates of infant mortality by race and class as natural and normal deflects attention away from the plethora of public policies that contribute to these excess infant deaths. Policy makers and government officials may not intentionally set out to kill poor babies of colour. Yet the social institutions that officials control and the policies that they support regulate the food, housing, schools, employment and health care that affects poor women and their babies. Through action and inaction, these institutions routinely replicate power hierarchies that fail to feed, house, educate, employ or provide health care for poor women of colour, thereby contributing to excess, avoidable deaths among babies of colour. Violence disappears within statistical inequalities that ironically provide the best evidence for patterns of institutionalized violence. No one is seemingly responsible for the institutionalized practices that kill babies. Instead, those who benefit from this particular lethal intersection feel no accountability to address routinized violence that remains invisible to them (Collins 1998). When racism, sexism, class exploitation and homophobia become so deeply and uncritically embedded in the rules, regulations and practices of social institutions that social inequality appears to be hegemonic, this routinization effectively hides the violence that is essential to political domination. Take for example, how policies of mass incarceration in the United States took decades to put into place, mainly through the decision-making of ordinary governance. There was no coup that installed a dictator who proclaimed that the new policy was to lock up Black, brown and/or poor people. Instead, the convergence of seemingly innocuous, disparate practices coalesced to build a prison industry that will take decades to dismantle. But maybe dismantling it is not the point. When it comes to the patterned violence of racism, the brilliance of routinized mass incarceration is that, because it does not overtly target Black, Latinx and Indigenous people, it cannot be accused of being racially discriminatory. In this case, ostensibly colourblind rules and regulations reproduce social inequality as firmly as the use of force. The institutionalized violence against these groups did not disappear. Instead, it became embedded in the rules and became even more routinized via a system of seemingly non-discriminatory ideas and practices. State-sanctioned violence that is not defined as violence at all, yet that is essential in sustaining racial inequality persists, seemingly hidden in plain sight.

38  Patricia Hill Collins Rules and regulations that organize these structural power relations are necessary, but they are not enough. 2 Political domination pivots on the question of how to get people to go willingly to their assigned places and stay there. And this is where violence becomes visible, necessary and important as a fundamental dimension of disciplinary power. Disciplinary power consists of the enforcement mechanisms that manage political domination. The threat of violence and the fear that it engenders underlie multiple systems of power—the abuse of children by adults, of women by men, and or poor people by rich people. Violence is used to discipline people to stay in their prescribed places within power relations of racism, sexism and similar systems of power. The disciplinary power of police, military personnel, corrections officers, security guards and others who enforce the rules is most visible because these categories are tasked with maintaining law and order. But contemporary concerns with security and safety go beyond these specific job categories. Certain populations become targets for specific disciplinary practices that may not be racially explicit but that are embedded within institutional policies. Take the case of African American citizenship rights. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th examines the legal roots of mass incarceration, a legal practice that ironically is situated within a Constitutional amendment that abolished chattel slavery. Ratified in 1865, the thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction [italics added].” This Constitutional amendment seemingly ends slavery. Yet the escape clause that legalized involuntary captivity shaped subsequent practices that targeted Africans such as incarcerating convicts who provided free labour, and of mass incarceration in urban areas. A constellation of ancillary practices stem from this legal structure that legalizes captivity for those who are accused or convicted of committing crimes. In the case of mass incarceration as a public policy that legally appears not to discriminate when, in fact, the law itself is inscribed within this legal exception. Seemingly colourblind policies reflect deeply entrenched forms of systemic racism that use legal means to suppress Black votes, for example, lifetime bans on voting for convicted felons even after they have completed their sentences. Voter suppression efforts aimed at Black citizens have used an array of legal tactics such as limiting access to polling places through the placement and timing of voting, and requiring forms of identification that are more readily available to whites than racial/ethnic groups. People who experience political domination such as this typically recognize it. Yet they may be unable to directly confront the institutions that organize and enforce institutionalized violence. The use of police and military power has long been part of systemic racism in the United States that has differentially targeted Black and Indigenous peoples. The effects of extra-judicial killings of Black men, historically through lynchings in rural

Violence and intersecting power relations  39 and urban Southern states, and through police actions in urban areas, inform contemporary US race relations. Despite the fact that many activists and scholars analysed the racial implications of mass incarceration policies when they were first put into place, many white people who supported law and order campaigns in the 1990s did not see incarceration as racialized. Two decades after the fact, many have since acknowledged that the legislation on incarceration that they implemented, though not intentionally discriminatory, has had racially disparate effects. Resisting violence is often an important goal of ongoing grassroots mobilization that catalyses broader social movement activism. George Floyd’s 2020 death in police custody catalysed widespread global social protests that, for many white Americans, seemed to come from nowhere. Yet Floyd’s killing was neither new nor unfamiliar—this seemingly isolated event was part of an ongoing pattern of state-sanctioned violence against Black people. The formation of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2013 that protested differential policing against Black people laid a foundation for subsequent global social protest. The global social protests of 2020 may signal an important breakthrough moment of coalitional politics against social injustices. One important dimension of the impact of the Black Lives Matter Movement may outlive its visibility as the face of social protest against anti-Black racism. Challenging the ideas that provoke violence within intersecting power relations constitutes an important site of political contestation. The movement disrupted dominant narratives about the legitimate use of force against Black people and similarly subordinated groups. In doing so, it highlighted the importance of ideas both for normalizing and for resisting the routinized violence of disciplinary power. Disciplinary power requires a sympathetic cultural domain of power that produces the ideas that normalize violence against subordinated groups. But because the cultural domain of power is rarely ceded by subordinated groups, it constitutes an important site of resistance to cases of lethal intersections and the power relations they uphold.

Ideology, propaganda and hate speech: an interpretive context for violence Disciplinary power is implemented not through force alone but also through the manipulation of ideas through speech cultures. The routine and patterned nature of power relations does not occur in a philosophical and moral vacuum but requires ideas that facilitate violence and also justify its use as both legitimate and necessary. Ideas create an interpretive climate for violence and can been seen as an essential component of violence itself. Violence occupies a continuum that ranges from clearly visible actions to ideas that are deeply implicated in violence itself. These essential ideas that activate violence do not occur naturally. Rather, they are

40  Patricia Hill Collins created and reproduced by politicians, media figures, critics and scholars who, while they may deny doing so, are culpable for the violence that their ideas engender. Ideology, propaganda and hate speech provide an interpretive context for violence. Ideology refers to a system of ideas that explains social inequalities of multiple forms of oppression. Created and resisted over time, ideologies are situated in sites of knowledge creation and dissemination, most notably science and popular culture. White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, democracy and nationalism are all ideologies with important influence on social relations. Significantly, they are interconnected with one gaining meaning from others. Propaganda consists of the creation and dissemination of information that aims to influence public opinion. Political ideologies guide the contours of political propaganda that is created for specific social settings. Such information may be facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths or lies—the veracity of the information is less important than the intended effect of shaping public opinion or political messaging. Hate speech consists of microaggressions, both verbal and physical acts, that shape communications within a shared space. The climate of hate speech is more difficult to define than ideology and propaganda because it is constructed through human social interaction and has overt and covert forms of expression. Public speech that explicitly expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on attributes such as race, religion, gender or sexual orientation falls under the rubric of hate speech. Laws vary widely across nations for regulating this explicit, overt hate speech. The laws of some countries define hate speech as speech, gestures, conduct, writing or displays that incite violence or prejudicial actions against a group or members of a group based on their membership in that group, or that intimidate people based on their group membership. Yet the covert dimensions of hate speech may be more difficult to identify and root out. Violence within intersecting power relations is highly unlikely without some constellation of ideology, propaganda and/or hate speech that directly shapes disciplinary power. The interconnections among ideology, propaganda and hate speech highlight the significance of ideas for violence and political domination. For example, the connections between white supremacy as a racial ideology, the use of state-sanctioned propaganda and hate speech against targeted populations characterized the Nazi rise to power within the German nation state (1933–1945). Here white supremacist ideology fused with ultranationalist, religious, homophobic and xenophobic ideologies that ushered in fascism, itself an ideology and political program (Stanley 2018). Public opinion was swayed by carefully cultivated propaganda that, by stressing us versus them thinking about an array of social groups, glorified white, Aryan, heterosexual and Christian citizens, while demonizing all others as inferior. By encouraging this in-group of white, Aryan German citizens to perceive out-groups as domestic and foreign enemies who threatened

Violence and intersecting power relations  41 the nation state, Nazi propaganda weaponized hate speech towards outgroups. The increasing demonization of out-groups within normal society preceded mass incarceration in death camps, ushering in a modern era of genocide, the efficient, modern bureaucracy tasked with implementing Nazi policy killed Jews, Roma people, LGBTQ people and political dissidents. The slippery slope of hate speech within German society effectively resulted in legal mass murder. Germany is not unique but rather provides a compelling case of how, when coupled with the use of efficient state bureaucracies, propaganda and hate speech indicate the growing significance of culture for disciplinary power. With hindsight, far from disappearing, the turn of the new millennium signalled the temporary replacement of publicly expressed hate speech in the United States and in Europe with coded language that invoked ideologies and propaganda of racism, sexism, among others. In the United States, the overt hate speech against Black people, Indigenous people, Latinos, women and sexual minorities that permeated US culture through the mid-twentieth century became increasingly muted in public discourse but, seemingly thrived in private. The absence of overt hate speech seemingly enabled more covert versions of hate speech to flourish. This changing speech climate was essential for upholding colourblind public policies of mass incarceration, immigration and environmental regulation that had racially disparate effects on Black, Latinx, Indigenous and poor people in the United States. Moreover, this changing speech climate encouraged covert micro-aggressions that eschewed crass stereotypes but that invoked derogatory meanings concerning race, gender, class and sexuality and filled the void left by the retreat of overt hate speech. Under the guise of protecting free speech, institutional pushback consisted of dismissing the claims of those who were targeted by hate speech and trivializing efforts to regulate it. The emergence of governments in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, Poland and the Philippines and within electoral politics of European nations that embraced far-right ideologies revitalized the utility of propaganda for ultra-nationalist causes. By vastly expanding the volume and scope of ideas, new communications technologies of social media and the internet amplified the scope and effectiveness of such propaganda. Significantly, the rise of far-right political parties illustrates the masterful creation and use of propaganda that effectively normalizes and naturalizes routinized violence towards subordinated groups. The resurgence of hate speech in public forums by white nationalist, misogynistic and xenophobic ultra-nationalist actors does not determine violent actions; it does, however, foster a climate where violence becomes a more acceptable if not the only solution to perceived grievances. The media both shapes the speech climate for interpreting society as well as providing new sites for political mobilization. When this changing speech climate receives institutional approval if not endorsement from powerful public figures, it becomes part of the symbiotic relationship between violent speech and violent actions.

42  Patricia Hill Collins The Presidency of Donald Trump (2016–2020) illustrates the workings of this recursive relationship among ideology, propaganda and hate speech and political outcomes within democratic societies. During his campaign and while in office, Trump routinely used his Twitter account to disparage Muslims, Latinx immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, Asian-Americans and Black people through a relentless propaganda campaign of pejorative comments and fake news. In 2017, he refused to censure white nationalist militia groups who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia carrying insignia such as the Confederate flag and Nazi symbolism. In subsequent speeches, his words sounded a dog whistle for far-right groups, many of them heavily armed, whose ultra-nationalist agenda aimed to make good on his promise to “Make America Great Again.” When Trump lost his bid for re-election, he refused to concede and continued to claim without evidence that the election had been stolen from him. During his waning days in office, motivated by his January 6 speech, a large gathering of far-right supporters stormed the Capitol Building one hour after his speech, killing five people. Unlike those who took Trump’s words to mean that they should launch an illegal political insurrection, on that day Donald Trump never picked up a gun and shot anyone. He did not explicitly organize the armed militia groups that planted bombs near the Capital. Yet his inflammatory speech to the crowd who believed the propaganda of the stolen election served as a dog whistle to the crowd to act. The insurrection demonstrates the power of a deadly cocktail of white supremacist, misogynistic and ultranationalist ideology, a constant barrage of propaganda whose us-them thinking polarized a country for political gain, and a growing climate of hate speech that was rarely identified as such but that provided the interpretive context for armed insurrectionists. In a global context where ideas travel at dizzying speed, the importance of propaganda grows in significance as do the ideologies designed to strengthen or oppose it. This interpretive speech climate shines a new light on the symbiotic relationship linking violent actions and violent speech. It also highlights the growing significance of ideas for disciplinary power. Interpretive climates that tolerate hate speech, especially when promulgated through the propaganda of national heads of state or media figures who command large audiences, animate disciplinary power by providing a rationale for the use of violence. In this climate, suppressing speech as a way of suppressing violence seems increasingly naive. Certainly, racist, ultranationalist and misogynistic ideologies and the propaganda they engender merit censure, but we need to understand the power of speech and words to mobilize violent actions. Events in the United States and globally suggest that interpretive climates of hate speech that interpersonal microaggressions within interpersonal relationships are eroding democratic institutions and notions of the public good. The negative outcomes of lies, half-truths and bluster of fake news that make it difficult to recognize truth from propaganda no longer fall

Violence and intersecting power relations  43 disproportionately on Black people, Indigenous peoples, Jews or similar historically targeted groups. Instead, multiple groups that are differentially demonized within intersecting power relations now find themselves on the wrong end of propaganda that, under far-right governments, emanates from government officials and mainstream media sources. In this context, the view that the solution to hate speech and propaganda is more speech seems inadequate. The ideas themselves may be just words. But when used by powerful social actors, the words and ideas become weaponized. Disputes that cannot be settled within democratic political processes increasingly erode the institutions of civil society. With so many ideas in play, many of them expressing hate not just of people but also of democratic institutions, the new challenge lies in rethinking how speech climates encourage and/or discourage violence.

Implications What initially begins by documenting one case of racial violence or gender violence over time deepens as more systems of power come into view for explaining the same case. Moreover, archiving these cases positions those affected by violence to develop analyses of how political and intersectional analyses of violence in turn provide new lenses on the workings of capitalism, colonialism, racism and heteropatriarchy. Violence and intersecting power relations are interconnected. What are the implications of this analysis? First, the approach taken here centres analysis of violence within antiviolence initiatives. This model valorizes the analyses of grassroots activism that, in trying to solve a specific social problem, deepens intersectional analysis. As a form of critical inquiry and praxis, intersectionality needs to be constructed on the scaffold of anti-violence initiatives, not just on a careful reading of how elites wield power. Viewing violence as hegemonic and omnipotent can frame small actions to resist it as ineffectual and doomed to failure. But conceptualizing anti-violence initiatives as resisting the violence engendered by a specific lethal intersection invites new questions concerning the types of ideas and actions that oppose violence. When violence becomes naturalized and normalized to the point where it becomes invisible, then political domination becomes hegemonic. Yet when political actors peel back this hegemonic veneer and resist hate speech, violent acts, and routinized and normalized institutionalized violence, their political actions can have far-reaching effects. Second, the premise that systems of power mutually construct one another is fine on face value, but certain ideas and practices must be more important than others in their ability to do so. Because violence is simultaneously specific and universal, it provides an important site for analysing the organization and dynamics of intersecting power relations. The lethal intersections that produce harm and death and that excuse those who

44

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benefit from violence, as well as those who are culpable for it, provide a glimpse into how intersecting power relations are organized. The analysis of violence presented here provides a starting place and a lingua franca for analysing power itself that is simultaneously grounded in actual social processes, but that also includes space for theoretical analysis. Finally, when it comes to both violence and the intersecting power relations that catalyse it, genuine intellectual leadership that is capable of imagining and bringing about social change originates from below. My focus on the action strategies pursued by social actors who are impacted by violence situates front-line activists as the true drivers of innovative analysis and social change. Feminists, anti-racist activists, journalists, community organizers and practitioners in education, health care and social work have taken the lead in resisting and analysing violence as part of intersecting power relations. People who experience violence as risk to themselves and to their loved ones are far better positioned to speak authoritatively about violence and oppression than those who imagine what those relations might be. Significantly these people need allies who can work with them by following their lead. Theories of racial, gender, sexual or other forms of violence should always begin with the ideas and actions of people who are most affected and vulnerable to the harm done by oppression.

Notes 1 Ironically, contemporary readings of Crenshaw’s signature article routinely underemphasize Crenshaw’s efforts to address violence as a social problem as well as her focus on the experiences of women of color, leaving a decontextualized intersectionality that, while it speaks of race, class, gender and nation, rejects the kind of theorizing I advance here. See (Collins 2019, 121–126). 2 Power relations that routinize, normalize and legitimate violence are organized through four interrelated domains of power, namely, the structural, cultural, interpersonal and disciplinary. I examine variations of this domains of power framework throughout my work, notably, via a discussion of Black women’s empowerment in Black Feminist Thought (Collins 2000, 291–309), through an analysis of color blind racism in Another Kind of Public Education (Collins 2009, 52–81) and, in that same volume, resisting racism in school settings (Collins 2009, 88–134); and a case study of using the domains of power framework for an intersectional analysis of the FIFA World Cup in Intersectionality (Collins and Bilge 2020, 5–17). Here I focus on violence as an important mechanism for enforcing political domination through the use of disciplinary power. Whereas violence permeates all four domains, violence is often strongly associated with the disciplinary domain that is tasked with implementing the rules and procedures of domination from the structural domain, the ideologies that legitimate and defend the use of violence of the cultural domain and organize everyday social interaction of which people are authorized to use violence against whom. Significantly, the domains of power framework also highlights the myriad forms of resistance both within domains and across domains of power. The insights generated by anti-violence initiatives that embrace intersectional paradigms provides an analytical lens not just on how violence is organized, but how it can be resisted. See (Collins 1998, 2017).

Violence and intersecting power relations  45

References Berry, Mary Frances. 1994. Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America. New York: Penguin Press. Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2017. “At a Lethal Intersection: the killing of Ms Dhu.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ms-dhu. Cohen, Cathy J. 1999. The Boundaries of Blackness: Aids and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. “The Tie That Binds: Race, Gender and U.S. Violence.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21(5): 918–938. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2017. “On Violence, Intersectionality and Transversal Politics.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40(9): 1–14. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge. 2020 [2016]. Intersectionality, 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Polity. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6): 1241–1299. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future. London: Verso. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by R. Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2002. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marquez, John D. 2013. Black-Brown Solidarity: Racial Politics in the New Gulf South. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ransby, Barbara. 2003. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stanley, Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books.

2

The colonial debtscape Maria Giannacopoulos

Australia’s constitutional nomopoly An urgent and deep critique of Australia’s colonial law, one that would reveal it as a key site of racial and economic ordering, is necessary to counter colonial law’s deathly, nomocidal effects. Nomophilia (Giannacopoulos 2011, 2020, 1086), a blind love of law, persists in colonial Australia despite the fact that it is structurally illogical that colonial law could ever deliver decolonial justice. And because nomophilia pervades so much legal and academic thinking, a new lexicon is needed to make visible and to challenge the exploitative coloniality of Australian law. A deep decolonising critique of the Australian Constitution is necessary for at least two reasons: To challenge the “reformist” approaches that continue to dominate the Australian national debate, academic legal commentary and legal pedagogy. And to provide the critical legal language necessary for linking the function of the Constitution as nomopoly, a term I elaborate on below, with the state violence, or the nomocide that it gives rise to. The Deathscapes project provides an evidentiary ground for showing how settler colonial states systematically violate targeted populations, Indigenous, refugee and economically disenfranchised peoples, at and with the borders generated through the work of the colonial nomopoly. While the Australian Constitution has been extensively critiqued on racial grounds, and constitutional recognition for Indigenous people has been on the political agenda formally since 2012, insufficient attention has been paid to the way in which it provides a legal framework for exploitative coloniality to persist in the present. Here, critical attention to the structural role and effects of the Constitution reveals its status as a colonial nomopoly. This term seeks to make visible the way that the Australian Constitution occupies the position of singular legal authority by effacing its foundationally violent origins and by imposing a framework that seeks to eliminate competition for law. A nomopoly denotes a monopoly in the creation of nomos/law (Macdonald and Sandomierski 2006), but in a colonial context it has the added feature of structurally foreclosing the operations of the first laws of Aboriginal peoples by subjecting all to its

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-5

The colonial debtscape  47 monolithic rule. The absence of a legitimate basis for this subjectification or “throwing under” (Macdonald and Sandomierski 2006) is what gives rise to the need for continual policy moves, like the Recognise Campaign,1 which function as replacements for the lack of consent to rule that lies at the heart of Australian law. The Australian Constitution as a key exemplar of the colonial nomopoly plays a critical role in the retrospective exculpation for historical and ongoing state violence and economic theft. It also works to produce the legal borders against which targeted populations experience state violence. The nomopoly then is a critical component of the debtscape, the zone where Australia’s sovereign debt to Indigenous peoples (Giannacopoulos 2017) is disavowed through consent frameworks (colonial laws), which provide license for the colonial state to obfuscate existing evidence of its violent practices and to continue with exploitation and theft.

State violence archive: Deathscapes Deathscapes is an international project with the aim of mapping race and state violence in settler colonial Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The evidentiary aspect of the Deathscapes project is found in the meticulously researched case studies providing concrete proof of state violence as the lived effect of colonial governance in settler colonial contexts. The project which generates a single site in which otherwise silenced voices, artworks and testimonies relating to the lives of people targeted by state violence are collected and interconnected has the simply stated yet ambitious objective of ending deaths in custody. It is an analytical archive, organised around key case studies, which foreground the culpability of the state in countless deaths and where global imperial forces are revealed. The focus of this chapter is not to discuss the content of Deathscapes at length but to suggest that the significance of the existing case studies lies in their ability to provide analytical frameworks to understand unfolding violence. The fatal shooting by police of Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker while at home and on his own country at Yuendumu in the Northern Territory in 2019 (Giannacopoulos 2019) can be read against at least two of the Deathscapes case studies. Through the case study titled The Road: Passage through the Deathscape, we learn of the life and death of Mr Ward, a senior Ngaanyatjarra lore man and artist, aged 46, who died in the back of a prison van while being transported across the Western Desert on 27 January 2008 following his arrest for drink driving. Following his death, the coroner said that Mr Ward had not only suffered a terrible death, but that it was avoidable. The fact that the state official found Mr Ward’s death to be avoidable speaks directly to the profound absence of a duty of care towards him. Read in isolation, this police killing may seem exceptional but Deathscapes does not allow for this simplistic reading.

48  Maria Giannacopoulos At a Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms Dhu tells the story of Ms Dhu, a 22-year-old woman of the Yamatji-Nanda Nation and the Banjima People, who was taken into custody at the South Hedland police lock-up under a warrant of commitment for unpaid fines. She died within 44 hours of entering the custody of Western Australian police. Because the project connects crucial dots around the workings of colonial power, it offers a wholistic way of understanding contemporary violence, in this case police violence, while also building a body of evidence of that violence through artwork, testimony, film and poetry. As Jordy Silverstein has observed, Deathscapes affirms that “deaths in custody of racialised people … are not an accident. They are by design. They are a feature, not a bug, of the system” (2019). All three deaths of Mr Ward, Ms Dhu and that of Kumanjayi Walker might be seen as avoidable, to borrow the words of the coroner, but they are also the logical outcome of a system constitutionally built to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their laws. With other digital archive projects identifying that state harm or crime are on the rise, I suggest that Deathscapes stands apart in its global and scholarly activist vision. The Border Crossing Observatory (BOb) produces high quality, innovative academic research to transform understandings of irregular migration and border control. The Killing Times project is an updatable, interactive map showing evidence of mass killings from 1788 until 1928, which is described as a sustained and systematic process of conflict and expansion. The Deaths Inside Project from 2019 tracks all Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia and monitors systemic issues like the provision of appropriate medical care. While these projects have an exclusive focus on single issues such as irregular migration, historical killings of Indigenous peoples or on the counting of deaths, the Deathscapes project is conceptually expansive and politically daring: The unifying purpose and analytical approach is about social agitation and action to end state violence. Because Deathscapes does not have a single focus that limits or limiting borders around the state actions and violations that come under its purview and critique, it pioneers an original approach that is expansive and transnational to the study of state violence. It does this by deliberately moving “away from the nation as the primary analytical unit to consider forms of governance and social relations that are transnationally linked.” In taking a “cross-disciplinary approach to racialized state violence” the site maps “racialized deaths in custody in all their visual, analytical and geographical dimensions” (www.deathscapes.org/about-project/). Methodologically, intellectually and politically, the approach taken by Deathscapes is one of open borders. Unlike its peers, the project does not carefully delineate boundaries beyond which critique and analysis of state violence cannot extend. Deathscapes works against the silencing practices that accompany state violence and it does this by adopting and modelling a powerful genealogical method that is attentive to local detail within a global context where intellectual and political solidarity is urgently needed.

The colonial debtscape  49

A history of the present and borderless methodologies and pedagogies Chief Investigators of the Deathscapes project, Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, have for nearly three decades produced a body of critical intellectual work on race that uniquely positions them to direct this groundbreaking project that is engendering profound new forms of scholarly activism. The project, funded primarily by the Australian Research Council, is built to effect social change on the most pressing questions of injustice. It constitutes a racial “history of the present” and as such provides resources and a model for scholarly and political activism. As David Garland has observed, a history of the present “sounds paradoxical at first” (2014, 367). But this Foucauldian methodology that “explicitly and self-consciously begins with a diagnosis of the current situation” and has an “unabashed contemporary orientation” (Garland 2014, 367) is precisely the genealogical approach of Deathscapes. The site reveals through the voices and artefacts of those targeted by violent power “a series of troublesome associations and lineages” in order to trace how contemporary practices of state violence emerged out of “specific struggles, conflicts, alliances, and exercises of power, many of which are nowadays forgotten” (Garland 2014, 372). This method offers a way of writing critical race history by using historical materials to assess and understand the modern day and indeed to “problematize the present” (Garland 2014, 372). Deathscapes is genealogical because it allows otherwise silenced voices to speak to power struggles and attempts at domination to show how colonial power has taken its contemporary form. There can be no question that the burden assumed by Deathscapes in generating a body of evidence of global state violence is a form of writing history in the present by engaging boldly with “forces active in the present” within “a field of power relations and political struggle” (Garland 2014, 373). Because of this approach, Deathscapes has a profound pedagogical function. As an academic working with and between the disciplines of law, sociolegal studies and criminology and with undergraduate training in English literature, law and with a PhD in Cultural Studies, I have experienced the gatekeeping function of academic and pedagogical borders throughout my career. While universities ostensibly welcome interdisciplinarity, in reality, this happens alongside the powerful policing of disciplinary boundaries. I teach criminology without being a criminologist, but this is not unusual in the neoliberal university. I teach courses that are conducted from within the auspices of the colonial discipline of criminology (Agozino 2004; Cunneen and Tauri 2019, 359) and which examine the ways in which some populations are targeted for punishment in the absence of having committed any crime. Or, where crime has been committed, crime is defined and policed in ways that embed the colonial order. The courses deliberately depart from understandings of crime that posit an individual as the perpetrator of crime against another individual and/or symbolically against society. The idea

50  Maria Giannacopoulos that crime or wrongdoing against populations can also be perpetrated by those in power charged with the responsibility for the protection of peoples is disruptive to the core ideas holding the discipline together. In this approach to crime, the concepts of colonialism, race, sovereignty, austerity and illegitimate state power are crucial. There is a focus on the punishment of Indigenous populations, the punishment of those seeking asylum yet unable to cross state borders and on populations subjected to economic austerity regimes. This course requires an evidentiary body to draw on, as well as a critical vocabulary, in order to reveal how the punishment of populations is represented as legitimate. Within this context, I deploy Deathscapes to offer a decolonial approach to the teaching of crime. Chatterjee and Maira have identified that “imperialism and racial statecraft has three fronts: military, cultural and academic” (2014, 7). Their “conceptualization of the imperial university links these fronts of war, for the academic battleground is part of the culture wars that emerge in a militarized nation, one that is always presumably under threat, externally or internally” (2014, 7). Deathscapes has been a crucial resource with which to teach effectively against the criminological grain into a discipline deeply embedded within practices of imperialism. Criminology students are predominantly taught about the various arms of the criminal justice system (courts, policing, victimology), and crime is portrayed as being the act of an individual against society. When those directly and disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system speak about it, their voices are deemed “subjective, unscientific, and/or, at best, folk epistemology” by the imperial discipline (Cunneen and Tauri 2019, 364). This “ideologically driven dismissal” of Indigenous and/or embodied knowledge is “a key colonial project within the academy … especially within criminology” (Cunneen and Tauri 2019, 364). Deathscapes gives value to otherwise discredited voices by placing these within a knowledge community. Deathscapes provides a decolonising evidentiary ground for revealing the artificial and colonial line that holds between objective and subjective knowledge while showing the bloody impact of the colonial state’s so-called rational and objective legal order. Deathscapes is both archive and methodology with pedagogical and social action applications. In the section of the chapter that follows, I move to the law’s role in producing, but then also attempting to nullify the violence that Deathscapes so comprehensively brings to light.

Colonial nomopoly or constitutional borders The recent police killing of Kumanjayi Walker while in his home and on his own country continues to bear out the Deathscapes contention: That Indigenous peoples continue to die at the hands of the colonial state machinery. Regardless of whether the most recent killing in custody is proven to be murder, or found to be justified, neither outcome will be sufficient

The colonial debtscape  51 to address the deeper issue at the heart of the Australian nation. The violent death of Kumanjayi Walker must be understood in relation to other evidence— evidence that the law might deem circumstantial, but that is available on the public record tracking lethal policing of Indigenous peoples on their own lands. Historically, policing has played and continues to play a critical role in dispossession in a way that works to displace self-determination as a real option for Aboriginal peoples on their own countries. Chris Cunneen has shown that unlike any other group, Indigenous peoples were subjected to military-style policing, akin to a state of war by paramilitary policing units such as the Mounted Police and Native Police forces. This form of policing, according to Cunneen, was integral to the expansion of the British jurisdiction in Australia, and it was influenced in its intensity by the degree of Indigenous resistance to the colonial will. While dominant criminology would say that policing is said to operate by consent and through the impartial application of the rule of law, this cannot be said to hold true in Australia. Not only were Indigenous people resisting colonial governance and so not policed by consent, but the rule of law itself was ritually suspended from operation in the early colonial period. This meant that the murder of Indigenous people by specialist police forces or by settlers could be and was overlooked (Cunneen 2017, 3). So not only is it a feature of a nomopoly to deny Indigenous law and sovereignty, but also for the coloniser to disallow the exercise of even the most minimal form of remedial law where it might bring some measure of justice. As Australia awaits the trial outcome of the police officer who killed Kumanjayi Walker, the law will begin to do its work in transmuting witness reports, forensic data and all other information into evidence. Evidence is crucial to establish facts, ascribe guilt or absolve a defendant. But other evidence, as captured by Deathscapes for example, already exists and relates to the culpability of a colonial system that has resulted in systematic Aboriginal death or nomocide, and not just to the actions of an individual officer. At this juncture it is important to reveal in more detail the relevance of the Australian Constitution, as nomopoly, to the carcerality and related harm revealed by the Deathscapes project. Australia, as it is currently legally, politically and economically constituted, came into being in 1901 following the passing of a British Act of Parliament, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900. This is “whiteman’s law” to use the words of Senior Lawman Murray George who said that “Aboriginal law must sit on top of whiteman’s law, because our law is the law of the land” (Sovereign Union 2013). Alongside this critique sits the position of eminent constitutional lawyer George Williams declaring that the Constitution has “withstood political crises and the passage of time to produce a stable democracy responsive to and representative of the people. This has been a crucial factor in the economic and other successes of the Australian nation” (2000, 644). While the Australian Constitution has been critiqued on racial grounds, the dominating voices in this space

52  Maria Giannacopoulos advocate for reform (Williams 2000; Davis 2017). This dominant reformism leaves decolonial critical scholarship of the Constitution produced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars (Watson 2012, 2018; Giannacopoulos 2015, 2018) marginalised. And while it is logical that constitutional law as a key area of legal inquiry would not give primacy to critical knowledge that may undermine it, this is what gives such knowledge a colonising character. The critical insights that seek to name the coloniality of law, in this instance the naming of the Constitution as colonial nomopoly, are also the spaces where possibilities for decolonial justice reside. Writing in 2000 Williams acknowledged that while the Constitution has “produced stable democratic government” it “has failed Indigenous peoples” (2000, 647). About the drafting, he said: The Australian Constitution was drafted at two conventions held in the 1890s. Neither convention included any women, nor representatives of Australia’s Indigenous peoples and ethnic communities. In most cases, Aboriginal people were not qualified to vote for the delegates to the Convention and appear to have played no meaningful role in the drafting process itself. It is not surprising, then, that the Australian Constitution as drafted did not reflect their interests or aspirations. The preamble makes no mention of the prior occupation of Australia by its Indigenous peoples. In fact, the operative provisions of the Australian Constitution were premised upon their exclusion, and even discrimination against them. This, then, was the legal foundation upon which Aboriginal people were made part of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. (Williams 2000, 648) As important as the critiques that Williams makes are, they are situated as historical omissions and are silent on the foundational question of colonialism. His critique outlines the centrality of British whiteness in the establishment of the legal structure by identifying that the interests of Aboriginal people (and other ethnic peoples) were not considered, nor was “prior” occupation mentioned. And while Williams’ critiques are historically accurate, these exclusions and omissions are in fact logical if the Constitution is seen as a key colonial apparatus. Williams is of the view that the Constitution “as drafted” did not reflect the interests of Indigenous peoples, even though he notes they were affected more than any other group (2000, 646–647). The fact that Indigenous peoples were affected more than any other group is logically consistent if the Constitution is not only placed in a historical context but also understood within the context of colonisation. By coming into being, the Constitution erased what came before: Prior Indigenous occupation, laws and sovereignties. It assumed the position of nomopoly. This is downplayed by the trick of the constitutional reformist position. While the critique is a strong one, the

The colonial debtscape  53 belief in the Constitution itself underwrites and informs the critique. Central to Williams’ argument, then, is nomophilia (Giannacopoulos 2011, 2020, 1086). His critique exhibits an uncritical love for colonial law since he is confident that if the Constitution had been drafted differently with the interests of Indigenous peoples considered, the result would be less racist. He goes further to state that: There is no constitutional reason why a treaty could not recognise a measure of sovereignty or self-government for Indigenous peoples. This could be developed within the existing legal system. The Australian Federation already encompasses different laws co-existing at the federal, state, and local levels. The High Court in Mabo (No 2) has also given legal effect to the native title of Indigenous peoples and has found that the content of this title is defined by Indigenous legal and cultural traditions. This did not fracture Australia’s existing system of law but was accommodated within it. (Williams 2000, 664) This type of critique does not acknowledge the pivotal role played by law as part of a colonial structure. And so, it produces and is symptomatic of nomophilia and remains the prevailing form of the constitutional critique informing state approaches to questions of Indigenous justice. While the colonial undertaking began well before 1900, the Constitution generated an artificial yet materially violent origin point that sought to nomopolise what could constitute law in the newly founded “Australia” by replacing “an entire system of ownership with another” (Wolfe 2016, 34). But this violence was not able to do away with Indigenous peoples, their resistance and their laws. This gave rise to the need to impose a structure that could continually act on the desire to eliminate. Wolfe asserted that “settler societies seek to neutralise the extraneous sovereignties that conquered Natives continue to instantiate” (2016, 35–36). The state deals with this structural tension in several ways, including by seeking “consent to transfer of ownership” (2016, 36) even after they have nomopolised the land. There should be no doubt that the Australian High Court ruling in Mabo v Queensland (Mabo) entrenched the colonial borders of Australian law and power. But this is not the prevailing view. The more popular meaning is that the ruling did what it said it did and that was to reject “terra nullius as a legitimate source of legal foundation” (Watson 2002). And while the decision has been widely celebrated as advancing the place of Indigenous peoples under Australian law, these are politically naïve conclusions about Mabo that are productive of nomophilia. The formal rejection of the doctrine of terra nullius, more than 200 years after colonisation, has in fact entrenched its sovereignty according to Watson (2002). Although the High Court, a key institution in Australia’s constitutional infrastructure, identified the foundational logic for Australian law as fictitious, the violence

54  Maria Giannacopoulos done in the name of that fiction was left untouched by ruling that the sovereignty upon which the law was based was non-justiciable (Watson 2002). In other words, the colonial court produced by colonial sovereignty ruled that justice could not be done to the question of sovereignty (Giannacopoulos 2006, 45). The ruling was that the law could not trump sovereignty even if the location of the court was in that same moment being used to affirm colonial sovereignty and to create the conditions for its future. The Mabo decision as legal “event” has operated to cement foundationally violent legal borders and structures of invasion, while masquerading as justice for Indigenous peoples. This is nomophilic and fictitious. Despite the formal overturning of terra nullius, the Australian legal system is still “imposed” and locked in place to “deny pre-existing Aboriginal laws that have lived in this land from the beginning” (Watson 2002, 3). The effect of this imposition is that despite and perhaps because of moments of self-consciousness about its racial constitution, the legal system still operates to subjugate Nungas to the power of the colonial state. Australia is a place taken without the consent of the ‘natives’—with no treaty or agreements ever signed—where terra nullius filled a lawless void, is now hungry to construe our consent to the theft of our lands and the genocide of our peoples. (Watson 2002, 3) Despite Watson’s incisive and prolific critique of the terra nullius overturning being the trick of the Mabo decision, the official story became and remains that Australia’s legal system has since 1992 been humanely redressing its racial history. While the High Court of Australia “did reject terra nullius it was also highly concerned with the legitimacy of ‘Australia’ as a settled colony” (Watson 2014, 510). Out of that strategic rejection, or one that I name an exculpatory event, colonial power entrenched itself further by having one’s cake and eating it; that is the Mabo decision enjoyed a lime-lighted victory against the injustice of terra nullius while at the same time retaining the spoils of the unjust foundation by way of the continued and uncompensated occupation of First Nation peoples’ unceded territories. (Watson 2014, 510) But this was a “declarative” overturning and was just as fictitious as the original fiction because, like its predecessor, its work was to operate to further conceal the foundational sovereign debts of colonialism underpinning Australia’s successful economy (Giannacopoulos 2017). The legal

The colonial debtscape  55 order does the work of making theft permanent and guarding territory because, as Wolfe has observed, “territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific irreducible element” (2006, 388). The foregrounding of the landmark Mabo case here is to make a new claim about it. Through the act of revisiting colonial foundations triggered by the claims made by Eddie Mabo and his people, the landmark judgment has birthed and instituted another legal foundation, one that began in 1992 and one that further cements structures of invasion. As such it has nomophilically worked to conceal Australia’s sovereign debt and has provided a fresh foundation for subsequent legal events designed to efface colonial violence and cement colonial power. Where Watson’s vast body of work asserts that the endurance of terra nullius has been genocidal, Patrick Wolfe’s work makes a critical distinction between genocide and what he terms the “logic of elimination” (Wolfe 2006, 387). Extending the work of Wolfe helps to elucidate the ways in which Australian law, in particular the Australian Constitution, offers a legal form for invasion to be made permanent and a vehicle for colonial power to operate invisibly. Even though it could be argued that the “logic of elimination” has manifested as genocidal, Wolfe contends that the two should be distinguished because elimination performs two interrelated tasks. In its negative sense, it works to dissolve native societies since the principal motive for elimination is not race but access to territory. Having accessed this territory, “positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base” signifying the permanence of the coloniser’s intentions (Wolfe 2006, 388). In the Australian context the positive/negative dimensions of elimination manifest where: the erasure of indigeneity conflicts with the assertion of settler nationalism. On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and accordingly, its independence—from the mother country. (Wolfe 2006, 389) In Wolfe’s critical distinction between genocide and elimination as the logic of Australian settler colonialism is the insight that inclusion is an integral component of elimination. To be included in the colonial construct that is Australia effectively produces the logic of elimination. This form of colonial power operates on the basis that Indigenous peoples have survived genocide. This survival, then, presents opportunities for their inclusion within Australia without needing to surrender the seized territory. Such a form of inclusion operates to severely restrict or to eliminate the possibilities for Indigenous peoples to access and control their own territory. As Wolfe

56  Maria Giannacopoulos contends, “settler colonialism destroys to replace” (2006, 388), and by attempting the destruction of Indigenous laws, a space is cleared for colonial law to impose itself as singular. Colonial law and society then can tolerate the survival of Aboriginal peoples, but not of their laws and their status as sovereign peoples. In line with this, the quest for consent through legal events that foundationally cement colonial legal borders, is a major technology for elimination. The Constitutional Recognise Campaign has been such an event. It was firmly implicated in the project of gaining consent for law’s violence, but it had precedents in earlier legal events; events that are continually producing and reproducing the colonial structures of “invasion” as Wolfe has named it. In other words, colonial law operates to eliminate through inclusion within the borders of colonial law. This is achieved via the law’s key moments or events around race relations or around the question of the continued existence and status of Indigenous peoples in colonial society. Up until 1967, Indigenous peoples in Australia were not deemed to be human at all, until, as a result of a process of Aboriginal politicisation that was, according to Gary Foley, conservative in approach, the national referendum was held (2010). The result of this referendum was that from one extreme of being denied humanity, Indigenous peoples were now designated citizens of “Australia.” By fact of inclusion, their exclusion could once again be ensured. But as Gary Foley has argued, the Indigenous activism that resulted in the 1967 referendum was essentially conservative, and after the exodus of Indigenous peoples from rural areas to the urban centre of Redfern in Sydney in the 1960s, new forms of Indigenous activism emerged to redress questions of deep and foundational injustice of Indigenous people who survived but were expected to accept political and legal death. The founding of a “Black Power movement,” the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and calls for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (Foley 2010) built upon earlier activist struggles in places like Coranderrk, Yirrkala and Wave Hill to name but a few. The necessity of such activism to push back against injustices imposed by colonial law reveals the fundamental error in turning to the Constitution to seek remedies for ongoing attempts at genocide and dispossession. The constitutional nomopoly cements unlawful foundations and further entrenches colonial permanence over stolen territory. While Patrick Wolfe famously argued that invasion is “a structure and not an event,” I am building here on a lesser-known but related aspect of thought, that invasion is “constituted through events, through practices that colonisers repeatedly strive to maintain” (Wolfe 2016, 36). Here I emphasise constitutional legal events to show the centrality of structures of law in cementing invasion. These do not readily appear violent because the imposed nomopoly produces the fictitious understanding that law in the Australian context is legitimate, singular and without rival. This is nomophilia and it runs through a series of legal events that are presented (and often understood) as an antidote to the coloniality of law. Stemming from this is a blind

The colonial debtscape  57 love and faith in the correctness of colonial law. This is both product and contemporary device of the nomopoly.

Australia’s sovereign debtscape Australia’s sovereign debt crisis is still not formally acknowledged, but proof of it can be found in the Deathscapes archives where the state’s nomocidal violence against both Indigenous peoples and their countries is revealed. When effaced sovereign debt and the colonial legal apparatus meet, the debtscape is generated as the place where the foundational harms and contemporary modes of colonial power are cleansed and relicensed in the present day. The debtscape is the concealment of Australia’s unpaid sovereign debt to Aboriginal peoples where austerity has always been an aspect of colonial rule. The legal apparatus has a dual function in relation to the debtscape. It effaces its own violent and non-consensual foundation while authoring, enabling and legitimising the full force of legislative, judicial and police violence of the debtor state as it seeks to maintain possession of land that has been illegitimately seized in the nomopoly. To address nomocide, sovereign debt must become visible yet there is no national conversation underway to consider how this foundational debt, incurred through frontier violence, dispossessing land removals and the imposition of a British legal and political order, can stop accruing. Mabo, the case celebrated for bringing Australia’s legal system in line with human rights norms, in fact further buried the sovereign debt owed. When the High Court ruled that the nature of sovereignty held by the colonial state could not be questioned because it would “fracture the skeletal principle” upon which the law is premised (Giannacopoulos 2007, 5) law was constructing the border around how law should be understood. And it seems to work. Many legal scholars and law advocates follow the lead of the state and work to support the closing of borders on the question of sovereign debt. This is despite the ample evidence of colonial violence in the public realm. It is also despite the existence of the well-established (colonial) legal tenet that to know of harm or violence and turn away from it is to give consent for it to continue. In Australia, as in many other settler colonial countries globally, it is law, or rather a particular type of legal system, that imposes a colonial infrastructure over stolen territories. This imposition of law is a form of violence, but it does not appear as such because law is generally understood as the antithesis of violence. Across the body of my work I have argued that it is the machinery of the law that performs a foundational and violent role in dispossession and in ensuring the ongoing operations of colonial power. It is a colonial trick to see law as the innocent, impartial and objective regime that it attempts to represent itself as. To fall for this logic would mean being embroiled consciously or unconsciously in nomophilia. This belief in, or insistence on, the correctness of colonial law prevents the seeing of that regime as a system predicated on mass theft and violence against peoples and

58  Maria Giannacopoulos lands. The immeasurable sovereign debt incurred as a consequence of the theft of land, natural resources and more from the First Peoples of the land continues to be actively effaced by governments, corporations, privileged populations, as well as by many knowledge producers. Australia can be said to have a sovereign debt at several levels, with austerity for Indigenous peoples being a key colonial technology. While the colonial state made itself and extended its reach off the back of dispossession, First Nations Peoples were made poor by being removed from their own bountiful lands from where life-sustaining resources could be accessed, and from where their laws sprang and could be practiced. Across three interconnected moves, this chapter has argued that the Australian Constitution is a colonial nomopoly because it provides the structure for exploitative coloniality to persist in the present while erasing its foundationally violent origins, its dismissal of Indigenous law and its ongoing accrual of debt in the Australian debtscape. It has identified the archives where evidence of state violence exists and has argued that colonial law’s apparatuses and its agents work to erase that violence. Attending an Adelaide rally in 2019 to protest the police killing of Kumanjayi Walker, one of many around the country at the time, I could feel the grief and the intensity of the crowd that had gathered. As I moved towards the front of the crowd and looked up to see the speakers expressing solidarity with the young man’s family, the handprints of red paint that had been pressed against the smooth grey marble and granite of Parliament House became visible. This was an arresting image. The simulated bloodiness announced a deeper form of distress about the killing of countless Aboriginal peoples at the hands of the state. As I stood in the crowd, I wondered whether police would be prosecuting protestors too for offending against the property of the state—Parliament House, no less? Possibly. The laws would allow this despite the deeper charge of theft that could be made by the protestors against the state. The South Australian Parliament House walls were built from materials extracted, without consent from Kapunda and the granite used to build the base of the building from Victor Harbour. Could this defence for damaging property be unintelligible to colonial law, so entrenched is a legal order that obscures any vision of the conditions upon which it was founded? While the outcome of the murder trial of Constable Zachary Rolfe, the police officer who shot and killed Kumanjayi Walker, is yet unknown, the broader evidence on state violence is abundant and it is clear. When it comes to Indigenous peoples, Australian law and policing do not deal with crises—they both produce and are themselves the crisis (Giannacopoulos 2019). I am aware that some will find this conclusion extreme and may seek solace in the comforting fiction that law is about peace, policing and safety. But the evidence of the bloodshed created by state violence, as archived within the Deathscapes site, among other places, reveals exactly what is at

The colonial debtscape

59

Figure 2.1 Blood-Stained Parliament, Adelaide, Australia. Photo: Maria Giannacopoulos.

stake and what will follow by continuing to turn to colonial law for resolutions to colonial violence.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was published in borderlands. My deep gratitude to Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese for creating Deathscapes, which in turn generated the conditions for naming and articulating the workings of the colonial debtscape.

Note 1 Recognise was the multi-million-dollar Federally funded campaign to recognise Indigenous Peoples in the pre-amble of the Australian Constitution. This approach would not have altered the workings of the laws enshrined in the Constitution. The Expert Panel that was convened between 2012 and 2017 consulted widely with Indigenous Peoples, culminating in the proposal of generating a “First Nations voice to Parliament.” This was rejected by the Federal Government as it would disturb the existing structures of power. It is important to note that even if successful, a single voice in Parliament would not address the coloniality of the system in which this voice would reside.

60  Maria Giannacopoulos

References Agozino, Biko. 2004. “Imperialism, crime and criminology: Towards the decolonisation of criminology.” Crime, Law & Social Change, vol. 41: 343–358. Chatterjee, Piya and Maira, Sunaina. 2014. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cunneen, Chris. 2017. “Police violence: the case of Indigenous Australians.” In The Wiley Handbook on Violence and Aggression edited by P. Sturmey. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Cunneen, Chris and Tauri, Juan. 2019. “Indigenous peoples, criminology and criminal justice.” Annual Review of Criminology, vol. 2: 359–381. Davis, Megan. 2017. “To walk in two worlds.” The Monthly, July. https://www. themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/july/1498831200/megan-davis/walk-two-worlds Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States, viewed 20 January, 2020, https://www.deathscapes.org/ Foley, Gary. 2010. “A short history of the Australian indigenous resistance 1950– 1990.” http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/229.pdf Garland, David. 2014. “What is a ‘history of the present’? On Foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions.” Punishment & Society, vol. 16, no. 4: 365–384. Giannacopoulos, Maria. 2020. “Without love there can be law but no justice.” Globalizations, vol. 17, no. 7: 1085–1090. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2 019.1706918 ———. 2019. “‘Your laws are killing us’: The death of Kumanjayi Walker and the crisis of colonial law.” ABC Religion and Ethics, November 20. https:// www.abc.net.au/religion/the-death-of-kumanjayi-walker-and-the-crisis-ofcolonial-law/11722836 ———. 2018. “The Uluru statement from heart, one year on: Can a first nations voice yet be heard?” ABC Religion and Ethics. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ the-uluru-statement-from-heart-one-year-on-can-a-first-nations-v/10094678 ———. 2017. “Sovereign debt crises, referendums and the changing face of colonial power.” Continuum, vol. 31, no. 1: 33–42. ———. 2015. “Forget ‘modest change’: Racism is entrenched in our Constitution.” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/forget-modest-change-racism-isentrenched-in-our-constitution-42186 ———. 2011. “Nomophilia and bia: The love of law and the question of violence.” Borderlands vol. 10, no. 1: 1–19. ———. 2007. “Nomos basileus: The reign of law in a ‘world of violence’” ACRAWSA ejournal, 3, no. 1: 1–12. ———. 2006. “Mabo, Tampa and the non-justiciability of sovereignty.” In Our patch: Enacting Australian sovereignty post-2001 edited by S. Perera. Perth: Network Books: 45–70. Macdonald, Roderick and Sandomierski, David. 2006. “Against nomopolies.” Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4: 610–633. Silverstein, Jordana. 2019. “Mapping deaths in custody to dismantle carceral logic.” Overland, https://overland.org.au/2019/01/mapping-deaths-in-custodyto-dismantle-carceral-logic/ Sovereign Union: First Nations Asserting Sovereignty. 2013. “Aboriginal Law must sit on top of whiteman’s law, because our Law is the Law of this land.” http:// nationalunitygovernment.org/content/aboriginal-law-must-sit-top-whitemanslaw-because-our-law-law-land

The colonial debtscape  61 Watson, Irene. 2018. “Aboriginal recognition: Treaties and colonial Constitutions, ‘We have been here forever…’” Bond Law Review, vol. 30, no. 1: 7–18. ———. 2014. “Re-Centring first nations knowledge and places in a Terra Nullius Space.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous People, vol. 10, no. 5: 508–520. ———. 2012. “The future is our past: we once were sovereign and still are.” Indigenous Law Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 3. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ IndigLawB/2012/43.pdf ———. 2002. “Aboriginal Law and the sovereignty of terra nullius.” Borderlands, vol. 1, no. 2 http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/watson_laws.html Williams, George. 2000. “Race and the Australian constitution: From Federation to reconciliation.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal, vol. 38, no. 4: 643–666. Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. London: Verso. ———. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4: 387–409.

3

“You have to pay with your body” Sexual violence, border violence and the settler state Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

This chapter delineates sexual violence at the border in immigration detention prisons in the context of two settler colonial nation-states: Australia and the United States.1 Taking its impetus from the Deathscapes project, the premise that underpins our analysis of sexual violence and the border is that, in the context of the settler colonial state, the border operates as a site that is generative of multiple modalities of violence, one inscribed by an intertwined double movement: on the one hand, what is operative here is what Audra Simpson describes as the “acquisitional and territorial desire” that distinguishes settler colonial capitalism, premised as it is on a form of occupation of colonized land that aims to eliminate the very presence of the Indigene in its accumulative drive (Simpson 2014, 19); on the other hand, there is the imperative to militarise the border and to constitute it as a site of multiple forms of violence that work at once to assert and consolidate the illegitimate sovereignty of the settler state and instrumentalise it as a technology of deterrence. The violent border operations of both the United States and Australian nation-states exemplify this double movement. Our concern is to disclose the mobilisation of sexual violence as a specifically embodied modality of this violent settler regime. The foundation of the US settler state is underpinned by both the violent logic of the elimination of Native Americans, enabled through a series of legislative acts and unofficial policies, and the establishment of chattel slavery, as enshrined, and thereby policed and maintained, in and by the “corpus of law” (Spillers 1987, 78). The foundation of the US settler state was dependent upon the mass importation of captured human subjects, viewed as little more than replaceable human tonnage shipped across the trauma-soaked Middle Passage—a Black Atlantic that emerges as a “central geographical body” that orients, as a type of “arterial through line,” African American critical analyses of the “mass carnage” of slavery (Lethabo King 2019, 4–5, 11). These practices operated in tandem with the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the exploitation of Indigenous bodies as economic and symbolic resources for the national narratives of infinite expansionism and manifest destiny (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, 2–3).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-6

Sexual violence and the border  63 Emphatically casting her writing in the present tense, Tiffany Lethabo King underscores that the “grammar of Black and Red suffering” (Wildersen 2010, 4) must be situated in “the landscape in which the practice of enslaving Black people and making them fungible and accumulable symbols of spatial expansion happens alongside and in relationship to Indigenous genocide” (2019, 11). At this intersectional crux, race, space and bodies become coextensive with the two-pronged project of settler nation building through “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2004, 63). The epistemologies of the settler nation are here indissociable from ontological practice: on the one hand, Indigenous subjects were rendered as eliminable precisely in order to construct settler landscapes emptied of their autochthonous people, while, on the other hand, Black subjects were converted into fungible “objects” of enslaved labour that were instrumental in consolidating the very spatial expansion achieved by settler campaigns of genocide. The transnational relations of imperial power that bind the US settlergenocidal-slave state to the Australian nation are clearly evinced by the manner in which British slave money was foundational in establishing the Australian settler state. The University College London’s (UCL n.d.) Legacies of British Slave-ownership database documents how, “following the abolition of slavery, British slave owners” migrated to the Australian colony: where they bought up vast swathes of land (and in the process dispossessed Aboriginal people); they became directors of banks, museums and libraries, they built churches and they became governors who, in the case of Governor Broome, contributed to arguments in support of slavery of Aboriginal people. (Simmonds 2015) These imperial legacies of slavery, extractive racial capitalism and settler violence constitute the hidden “debtscapes-deathscapes” that Maria Giannacopoulos uncovers in her archaeology of the violent foundations of the Australian settler state (see Chapter 2). Under the legislated regime of the Aboriginal Protection Acts enacted across its various states, the Indigenous peoples of the continent, often forcibly removed as children from their families and sent to work as domestics (girls and women) or farmhands (boys and men) who supplied unpaid labour, were crucial to the national project of building the settler state, as now juridically identified through the ongoing Stolen Wages campaign to recover their dues (Kidd 2007). This forced Indigenous labour was supplemented by the violent practice that has often been pejoratively termed “Blackbirding,” through which Australian traders, between 1863 and 1904, kidnapped over 60,000 South Sea Islanders to work as indentured labour in the Queensland sugar plantations. The project of Australian nation-building and external colonization in the Torres Strait were enabled

64  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese by the Aboriginal Protection Acts that secured, through both military and paramilitary forces, the “clearing” of the land of its Indigenous peoples and the consequent corralling of those who had been violently captured into reserves, camps and penal settlements. Connecting the two different histories of settler colonial nation building, then, is this indelible, if repeatedly invisibilized, link: the expropriation of Aboriginal, Torres Strait and Native American land. We track these linkages not merely as a historical preamble, but in order to argue that these similar, and often different, colonial histories at once inform and continue to shape contemporary regimes of detention and their reproduction of sexual violence and assault against their captive populations. Our argument is that the border is a site where these forms of violence are concentrated and licensed, both at the legislative level and at the level of expansive discretionary powers which enable multiple forms of non-accountable force and violence to be directed against nonwhite and racialized bodies that are cast as threats to national security.

Settler-colonial genealogies and border violence In Mohawk Interruptus, Audra Simpson notes that “post-9/11 anxieties” and the preoccupation with national security in the United States and Canada “have a deeper history” that is enmeshed with that of the settler colonial state (Simpson 2014, 123). In the wake of 9/11, Simpson notes, at the border, the rights of Indigenous people like herself were constructed, along with those of others, as a threat to national security … ‘Status Cards’ issued by Canada and the United States attesting to our recognition as Indians would no longer suffice … our bodies, narratives, and arguments then folded into the seemingly newer threat to settler sovereignty and security—the illegal alien, the alwayspossible terrorist—rendering perhaps all bodies of color as border transgressors with the presumed intent to harm. (2014, 123) Some of the ways in which threats to settler colonial sovereignty and security by such border transgressors are “folded into” one another are further elaborated by Richard Rodriguez, in an article titled “Not counting Mexicans and Indians.” Rodriguez insistently connects the ongoing forms of violence that characterize the US state: violence against Indigenous peoples since 1492, the racialized punishment of Black and Brown prisoners in the US jails and violence against immigrants at its borders. This violence at the border, Rodriguez further argues, is one that is ever expanding: Within the past generation, the border has literally become a killing field. It has become a cemetery for migrants from Mexico and Central

Sexual violence and the border  65 America. And yet, in many ways, the border has extended to the entire country … For example, in December 2014, the US Justice Department put forth new racial profiling guidelines that formally ban racial profiling in the United States. There are, however, two huge exceptions that render these guidelines virtually meaningless for Brown peoples. The guidelines exempt both the border region, which “legally” means 100 miles from the actual border, plus much of the Department of Homeland Security. (Rodriguez 2015) The Department of Homeland Security oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons in the United States, a fact that crystallizes the relation between border security and settler colonial sovereignty. In both the US and Australian contexts, regimes of immigration detention must be seen as predicated on reproducing and attempting to legitimate national sovereignties secured through violence, subjugation, attempted genocide and the social, political, cultural and economic extinguishment of their respective Indigenous peoples. To connect practices of immigration detention of asylum seekers, refugees and the undocumented to the incarceration of racialized prisoners is to bring into focus the ongoing tensions and contradictions that continue to unsettle the seemingly completed project of the modular and unitary settler colonial nation-state. Violent practices of immigration detention, when examined within these two geopolitical contexts, expose those very pressure points of instability that challenge the authority of the settler colonial state to determine, once and for all, who may assume residence within its boundaries. More recently, in her powerful work Incarcerated Stories, Chickasaw scholar Shannon Speed crosses the disciplinary boundaries between Indigenous Studies and Migration Studies to tell the stories of Indigenous women migrants who cross the US southern border fleeing political violence, economic violence, family violence or other forms of peril that threaten their lives. Speed makes the astute observation that the ongoing structures of settler colonialism are often “absent or undertheorized” in Migration Studies approaches to people crossing the border, “leading to an overemphasis on U.S policy without an analysis of the structures that policy is defined within” (Speed 2019, 13). Speed argues that countering this absence, “Indigenous Studies can provide the intellectual space to think about migration because of the insight that Indigenous migration provides into larger settler structures” (14). Working at the intersection of gender violence, settler colonialism and neoliberalism, Speed sets out to show how “the structural situatedness of Indigenous women migrants…[can] reveal the settler- capitalist structures in which their lives and migrations are enmeshed” (14). The connections that Speed, Simpson, Lethabo King and Rodriguez outline from their various positions are in productive dialogue with our own analysis of the border as a continuing site where settler colonial sovereignty

66  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese is enacted and reproduced through sexual violence. In what follows, we signal a number of the axes along which the treatment of illegalized arrivals not only functions to reproduce ongoing forms of settler colonial violence, but also ramifies and mutates into new formations: specifically, practices that reinscribe patterns of racialized punishment directed at enslaved and colonized Indigenous peoples. The technologies and practices of both slavery and continuing Indigenous dispossession, we argue, stage their historical returns in certain practices of immigration detention.

(Still) out of sight: normalised sexual violence at the border “Even as women around the world are speaking out against sexual misconduct,” Manny Fernandez (2019) notes, “migrant women on the border live in the shadows of the #MeToo movement.” Julie Goldscheid (2019, 1640– 1641) recapitulates Fernandez’ concerns: in the wake of the “outpouring of revelations and public reckoning with sexual harassment in a range of contexts galvanized by the #MeToo movement,” and even “while calls for accountability have targeted Hollywood, employers, universities, and even the Catholic Church, relatively little outcry has focused on the longstanding and under-recognized problem of sexual assaults by government actors” in immigration detention prisons. This “under-recognised” problem emerges as particularly alarming when, in the face of the graphic evidence that is now on record in the United States (in both Department of Homeland Security and ICE databases), “There is an unchecked epidemic of sexual assault occurring in immigration detention facilities nationwide” (O’Leary 2019). The dispatch of sexual violence against immigrant women to the shadows of the #MeToo movement has worked at once to make invisible the scale of what is unfolding in the already fraught terrain of the border and, in effect, to normalise it so “that sexual violence has become an inescapable part of the collective migrant journey” (Fernandez 2019). Cristina Tanzola (2019, 56) draws attention to the violent structural effects produced by both the invisibilisation and normalisation of sexual violence against immigrant women as they are inscribed by intersecting axes of vulnerability that work to silence and to erase their lived traumas: Silencing of immigrant women, at a base level, comes from the fear and threat of their attacker [and the additional threat of deportation]. I argue that silencing comes from the fact that immigration law generalizes undocumented women as criminals, which makes it more difficult to make oneself visible when abuse occurs. Extrapolating from Tanzola’s critical insight, we contend that what is operative here is a vicious, because circular, legal logic that is foundational to the silencing and ongoing erasure of immigrant women’s experiences of sexual violence: as they are always already framed as criminal before the

Sexual violence and the border  67 law, they have no legitimate juridical base from which to articulate their claims for remedy and justice in a system of law that, structurally and to the letter, criminalises them before the fact. In the case of Australia’s offshore immigration detention program, carried out on the territories of its former colonial protectorates in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, we argue that sexual violence against refugees and asylum seekers takes the form of both spectacle and secret (Perera and Pugliese 2018): that is, this violence remains officially invisible and deniable even as it forms part of the spectacle of “deterrence” intended to enforce the sanctity of Australia’s own “sovereign borders.” (Operation Sovereign Borders is the official title of the program to halt the arrival of refugee boats). A 2016 report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch noted that “Few other countries go to such lengths [as Australia] to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom” (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch 2016). Through this deliberate and highly visible infliction of suffering, in the name of protecting the borders, the violence of settler colonial sovereignty is reproduced and revindicated. In their influential discussion of the prison as a border, Angela Davis and Gina Dent situate the prison as “a contingent historical institution that not only prefigures globalization but allows us to think today about the intersections of punishment, gender, and race, within and beyond the borders of the United States” (2001, 1236). They mark, in particular, how shared histories of the prison as a colonial institution have in turn enabled the rapid adoption of contemporary models of the US prison-industrial complex by states as seemingly remote as Australia: “how stunned we were when we learned a company headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee (the Corrections Corporation of America) owns and operates the largest women's prison in Australia” (2001, 1237). For much of the following two decades, Australia not only followed the US model in outsourcing immigration detention to multinational private companies, but it engaged in a further level of outsourcing by contracting two of its neighbouring states, its former colonial protectorates of Papua New Guinea and Nauru, to act as the operators of its offshore immigration prisons. 2 The offshore camps were established with the stated intention to ensure, in line with Operation Sovereign Borders, that no person seeking asylum by boat will “ever set foot on Australian soil,” even if they were determined to be a refugee. The impoverished client governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea provided land for the camps, which were operated for profit by a shifting cast of multinational private companies, including Wilson Security, Serco, Transfield and Broadspectrum, on behalf of the Australian state. IHMS, the same company employed by the US military to provide health services in the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan, was responsible for health care for the inmates of Australia’s offshore camps for the bulk of this period, with as many as 12 detainees dying in custody during this period (Bui et al. 2018). Despite the nominal responsibility of the Nauru

68  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese and PNG governments for these sites, all major decisions regarding the camps are made by the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), later renamed Australian Border Force. The neocolonial nature of this arrangement is emphasized by the fact that Australian citizens are employed in all the managerial and supervisory roles throughout the camps, with quotas of local PNG and Nauru staff contracted for the menial roles of cleaners and guards. There are inextricable ties between the state and its entrepreneurial operatives, informed by the logic of a virulent neoliberalism that ensures both the outsourcing of state functions and facilities for private profit and the violent commodification of detainees’ bodies as captive sites from which to extract exploitative and voyeuristic pleasures. The latter is encapsulated in an anecdote in the Moss report (DIBP 2014) into the Australian offshore detention camp in Nauru, where women detainees recount being asked to strip and pose naked for guards in order to access the most basic of quotidian commodities (such as soap) and practices (a hot shower for their children). As one victim of repeated sexual assault in the US immigration context recounts, she was told by her assailant: “You guys don’t have money, so you have to pay with your body” (Fernandez 2019). Two US reports, Detained and at Risk: Sexual Abuse and Harassment in United States Immigration Detention and In the Shadows: Sexual Violence in U.S. Detention Facilities, document cases of sexual assault of detainees that parallel instances of sexual violence in Australian immigration detention prisons. The US cases include “observing females showering in the nude, and smuggling drugs and ‘contraband’ food” (Rentz 2011). Women detained in an ICE prison in southern Texas have alleged that workers there have sexually abused them, including removing them from their cells at night for sex as well as fondling them in front of others … Some guards or other workers at the Karnes County Residential Center also asked for favors of female detainees in exchange for money or promises of assistance. (Kuo and Hanna 2014) The use of sex as currency between immigration detainees and guards is amply documented both in the United States and Australia. The Moss report further reveals how detainees are forced into addiction as part of this destructive process of sexual exploitation in the Nauru camp. A detainee reported: Because they are suffering great depression here, and they feel relieved when they smoke the marijuana. The officers have made them addicted for their own reasons … Because the women do not get paid here … they only have to offer sexual – fulfill the requests of the men. (DIBP 2014, 33)

Sexual violence and the border  69 Inmates of the Australian camps on both Nauru and Manus Island testified through various means to the various exploitative economies that operate in the industrial complex of immigration detention. In a cartoon titled “The Gift” (2014), for example, the artist Eaten Fish, an inmate, visually maps the circuits of sex, food, phone cards, cigarettes and other such commodities that make up the underground economy calculated to prey on the weakest and most vulnerable in the Manus Island detention camp. As the central figure, Ali, makes his daily round of the camp, trying to obtain a phone card to ring home on Mother’s Day, the words, “no chance, no change” are repeated again and again. The drawing ends with an unambiguous appeal, in large letters: Help Me.

“Other penalties” We understand the exploitative and destructive economies in which incarcerated asylum seekers are enmeshed as instances of what Joy James identifies as the “other penalties” to which prisoners in US jails are subject. James argues that while executions and state killings, the “raw expression of state violence, are macroagressions against life and community,” a more “intimate state violence” is performed by microaggressions, “the invasive incarceration practices that ravage the person without immediately killing his or her body” (2015, vii). James terms these invasive practices the “other penalties” (i.e., other than execution) of the US prison-industrial complex: “Other penalties” is a synonym for trauma: “medical handcuffs” and drug stupors; captivity in mental and emotional wastelands; sterilization; vulnerability to (gang) rape while institutionalized; solitary confinement’s evisceration of the soul and neurological instability (vii). Report after report on the Australian offshore camps documents the extent of inmates’ exposure to the forms of intimate state violence that James itemizes, invasive “other penalties” that ravage the body, mind and soul (DIBP 2014; Commonwealth of Australia 2015; Australian Human Rights Commission 2015; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch 2016). The threat of rape and sexual violence is pervasive—whether at the hands of other inmates, of Australian and local guards or of ordinary PNG and Nauru citizens when inmates are released into a mockery of indefinite “settlement” in local communities—communities who have often made it plain that they view the refugees’ presence as an intrusion forced on them by Australia (Perera and Pugliese 2015). In the context of Manus camp, inmates have documented the existence of the “notorious P Block, known as the ‘rape dungeon,’ where vulnerable detainees were forcibly taken to be violently sexually assaulted” (Doherty et al. 2017). For women prisoners on Nauru, whether within the confines of the camp, or after their “release” into the community, the fear of sexual assault determines even the most mundane of activities: women tell of resorting to sleeping in their jeans to deter potential rapists, while other women and children are forced to “wet

70  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

Figure 3.1 A Catalogue of Deaths at the Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney. Screenshot from Deathscapes Case Study, “Villawood: A Suburban Deathscape in Plain Sight.”

their beds, wear pads or squat outside their tents to avoid the risk of violence associated with making a trip to the toilet” at night (Harvey 2016). It is indisputable that the threat of sexual violence forms part of the repertoire of “deterrence” and punishment of Australian immigration detention. In the words of Michael Bochenek, senior counsel on children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, “Driving adult and even child refugees to the breaking point with sustained abuse appears to be one of Australia’s aims on Nauru” (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch 2016). LGBTQI+ refugees who have fled homophobic persecution and violence in their countries of origin often find themselves, in the context of the detention prisons, exposed to the very violence and abuse that they desperately attempted to escape. Nan Seuffert (2015, 57) documents “their particular vulnerabilities fleeing persecution on the basis of sexual orientation, in detention camps, and in the process of applying for refugee status” and analyses a range of cases of homo-and transphobic harassment and sexual assault within Australia’s domestic and offshore immigration prisons. In the United States, Julie Goldscheid (2019, 1639–1640) examines how sexual abuse is not only “rife in immigration detention,” but how “LGBTQ immigrants and immigrant detainees are particularly targeted” (see also O’Leary 2019). The racialized nature of this particular form of intimate state violence is evidenced by the testimony of one immigrant of colour, in which he describes how a corrections officer, after

Sexual violence and the border  71 manhandling him in the course of one body search, “whispered in his ear, ‘[y]ou don’t feel like a Mexican,’ grabbed his genitals and subjected him to nearly daily verbal sexual comments and pat-down searches” (Goldscheid 2019, 1667). Here the “strip search” becomes a racialized practice that licenses invasive forms of sexual assault against those so targeted: “a transgender incarcerated woman” attests to how a “guard sexually assaulted her when the guard inappropriately touched the prisoner’s rectum in the course of a strip search” (Goldscheid 2019, 1639). The targeted body in these contexts of sexual assault emerges as a form of corporeal “property” that can be freely inspected, handled and penetrated by the guards and Border Patrol agents. As a number of immigrant sexual assault victims have testified, in these contexts of intimate state violence, the targeted subjects in question are transmuted into “nueva carne”: “he said I was new meat” (quoted in Fernandez 2019). As the embodiment of “new meat,” the victims document how they have been “bound with duct tape, raped and stabbed,” “tied to trees” and tied to beds by ropes by their hands and feet while they were repeatedly raped by Border Patrol agents (Fernandez 2019). Perhaps the most disturbing instances of the “other penalties” of intimate state violence in Australia’s offshore camps relate to women who become pregnant as a result of rape and the enmeshment of their bodies in the unrelenting performance and spectacle of “border protection.” One such case is that of “Abyan,” a 23-year-old Somali woman who became pregnant following rape. Abyan was authorized to come to Australia for an abortion after her plight was publicized by advocates, but she was then summarily removed back to Nauru by Ministerial order before she could access appropriate interpreting and counselling prior to the procedure, on the grounds that she had delayed in making up her mind (Tranter 2016). An even more harrowing case is that of a second young African refugee, known only as S99, who was raped while she was in the throes of an epileptic seizure. When it was discovered that S99 was pregnant, her requests to be brought to Australia for treatment were denied, on the grounds that she might later seek to remain in Australia. Instead, Australian authorities dispatched her to Papua New Guinea to seek an abortion, although the procedure is not legal in that country. During an appeal on her behalf heard by the Australian Federal Court, counsel representing the Department of Immigration and Border Protection denied any responsibility for S99, although she was a recognized refugee who had originally arrived in Australia by boat before being sent into immigration imprisonment in Nauru. Found to be a refugee, but banned from ever setting foot on Australian soil, S99 was ‘settled’ to live out her life in the unsafe conditions of Nauru. Stephen Donaghue, QC, representing the Department of Immigration and Border Control and the Commonwealth of Australia, told the Federal Court that Australia could not be considered responsible for the woman's care.

72  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese “This plaintiff was found to be a refugee in Nauru about 18 months ago; she hasn't been detained ever since then, she’s been living in the Nauruan community …” Mr Donaghue said. “She’s not in any way, in our submission, under the control of the Commonwealth in the way that an immigration detainee traditionally should be. (Hall 2016) The Court, however, ruled against the Department, affirming that Australia bore a duty of care to the woman, and that the attempt by the Australian Minister to procure an abortion for her in PNG were neither safe nor legal (Tranter 2016). Even as the Ministry of Immigration and Border Protection repeatedly deflects questions regarding sexual assault in offshore detention centres, as in the cases above, insisting that these assaults occur within the jurisdiction of the PNG or Nauru governments, a 2015 case in which Australian nationals were summarily removed from PNG jurisdiction instantiates the manipulative manner in which doctrines of accountability and national sovereignty are exercised and obfuscated within an overriding neocolonial relationship between Australia and the region. At the same time, these incidents illustrate the tensions endemic to the border site where complex racial and social hierarchies operate among mainly South Asian, African and Middle Eastern detainees, local PNG and Nauruan communities who must host the camps on their land, and Australian and local employees in the camps. In October 2015, three male Australian citizens working for a private service provider at the camp were apprehended by local PNG police along with a PNG woman, also an employee at the camp. All four were naked and intoxicated (Cochrane and Manuai 2015; Om 2016). The following day the woman made allegations of being given unidentified pills before being subjected to indecent exposure, sexual assault and rape by the Australian men. Before local police could investigate, however, the three Australians were flown out of PNG by their employer and returned to Australia. This incident at the border reveals the colonial and neocolonial relations of sovereignty and gendered and racialized hierarchies of power among inmates, locals and Australian overlords: Wilson Security’s employees, as Australian citizens, enjoyed the impunity accorded to an occupying force in their relationship to local PNG citizens, and were able to be airlifted out of local jurisdiction, with the camp operator and Australian state working in tandem to override PNG sovereignty. Although the PNG police called repeatedly for the Australians to be extradited to face court, their requests were not met, and a deadline set by the Manus Island police chief for their return was simply ignored. A 68-page report into the incident conducted by the Australian Borderforce authorities has had almost every page redacted (Om 2016).

Sexual violence and the border  73 Inscribing such practices of the sexual commodification and assault on detainees and locals is a long and traumatic history of the colonial state’s violence towards Indigenous women and girls (in camps, welfare institutions and the domestic settings). As the Deathscapes case study, “Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State,” argues, practices of trafficking, abuse, exploitation of labour and a myriad other practices of the settler state “render Indigenous women’s lives unsafe and produce their deaths.” This violence is “not accidental or random, but a systematic outcome of the logic of settler colonialism,” amounting to Indigenous femicide (Allas et al. 2018).

Border violence, sexual violence and the lens of slavery We conclude this discussion by returning to the intersectional crux of practices of enslavement and the expropriation of land. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the Australian Prime Minister chided protesters in Australia for participating in the global wave of BLM protests because, he said, “there was no slavery in Australia” (Borys 2020). Refuting his words, Noongar activist and scholar Hannah McGlade (see Chapters 5 and 15) traced her own family histories in which indentured labour, incarceration, sexual violence and dispossession from country entwine: The Prime Minister thinks that Black Lives Matter should not be imported into this country from overseas. He said we had no slavery in this country. The first building erected in the Swan River Colony was the Roundhouse in Fremantle, and it was built in 1830 to incarcerate Aboriginal men who resisted colonists’ attempts to enslave and indenture them to wealthy pastoralists. Many of the men forcibly taken in neck chains to Rottnest, Wadjemup, died at the island, many were executed, and this island is the largest mass grave in Australia today. I am the great-granddaughter of Ethel Woyung who was indentured as a girl and whose brother Mindum was incarcerated at Wadjemup which he escaped. (McGlade 2020) The incarceration and institutionalization of Indigenous women, Eileen Baldry, Bree Carlton and Chris Cunneen write, “viewed through the lens of slavery and colonialism in the unique context of the United States, provides a useful model for understanding the historical evolution of racialized regulation and punishment in Australia” (2015, 175) as well. We attempt to map here how this violence is foundationally sourced and reproduced within colonial relations of power that continue to work hand-in-hand with neoliberal market forces in the context of immigration detention in these two states. We situate these practices in the context of a number of recent theorizations of slaving and the continuities of practices of slavery in the United States.

74  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese In a stirring piece on slavery’s afterlife, Stephen Dillon identifies the structures, artefacts and technologies of contemporary punishment and imprisonment—such as manacles, shackles, bars, coffles, the holding pen, the barracoon—as forms in which slavery leaves its marks in the present. As Dillon puts it, a “necropolitics of slavery haunt the biopolitics of neoliberalism” and its landscape of incarceration and impoverishment of racialized populations; indeed, the logics and technologies of slavery, “not only haunt but possess the present” (Dillon 2012, 115). Dillon’s argument might be extended from the prisons of settler colonies in North America to globalized economies, with their complex relation to illegalized passages and the traffic of peoples; the drag and pull of cheap labour and human capital to the fringes of the global north, their imbrication in global orders of value and waste, war and peace, living and dying. In the technologies of transport, trade, exchange, trafficking, warehousing, corralling, enclosing, detaining, punishing and killing that make up today’s illegalized passages, slavery’s pasts seem to be reflected and refracted back in scattered and uneven ways. As this suggests, we do not understand slavery here as a homogenous formation. Rather, drawing on continuities pinpointed by scholars such as Angela Davis (2001), Jared Sexton (2017), Hortense Spillers (2003), Saidiya Hartman (1997) and many others, we are suggesting the ways in which formations of labour, capital, race and violence reconstitute themselves in the colonial present through technologies of subjugation, incarceration and punishment. In a striking essay that begins with the carceral production of his office desk at California State University, Brady Heimer traces the “social sedimentations” of US slavery that are reactivated in “the policy, practice, and discourse of mass incarceration” (2015, 14). These “sedimentations” operate across both domestic and immigration incarceration regimes. According to a report by Carl Takei, an attorney with the ACLU Prison Project, to name one example, “The [US] government, which forbids everyone else from hiring people without documents, has effectively become the biggest employer of undocumented migrants in the country” (Starr 2015). In centres operated by the GEO group, which operates roughly half the centres in the United States, detainees are employed at the inhuman rates of “$1 day or roughly 13 cents an hour”; in Jacqueline Stevens’ words, they “do everything except guarding the people who work there”(Starr 2015). As Baldry, Carlton and Cunneen put it, “colonialism (and neocolonialism)” appear “as a sociopolitical system that in effect comprises a prison. This colonial carceral landscape provides a unique context for understanding the historical and contemporary administration of punishment within the Australian criminal justice system” (2015, 183, original italics). We would argue in fact that this colonial carceral landscape, while bearing distinctive Australian characteristics, also constitutes a larger transnational template that can be seen to be operative across a number of settler-colonial states rooted in the British Empire, including the United States.

Sexual violence and the border

75

Working hand-in-hand, these combined economic and racialized sedimentations hail into being subjects whose very frames of intelligibility and operationality are always already extra-individual and premised on those of the settler colonial state. It is from these extra-individual and statist premises that all else flows into those individuated tributaries and embodied sites that we call upon to evidence our comparative analysis. In other words, we argue that, in the context of the border and immigration detention prisons, particularised case histories of subjugating violence and sexual assault can only be made sense of against the structural and institutionalised forces that insistently demand and reproduce various forms of violence, sexual or otherwise, precisely as normative outcomes. It is, indeed, the very structural and institutional normativity that guarantees impunity for the individual subjects (guards, security officers, Border Patrol agents, bureaucrats and so on) who exercise violence on their captive targets in the harrowed spaces of the border and in the confines of immigration detention prisons. These normative relations of power must be seen, as we discussed above, as enabling the invisibilisation-through-normalisation of the sexual violence inflicted on the targeted immigrants traversing borders or incarcerated within immigration detention prisons. These violent relations of normalisation—constituted by imbricated dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, colonialism and extractive capitalism—work to render the immigrant victims of sexual violence as largely beyond the purview of law and justice precisely because they have been rendered as a priori criminal. The uncertified immigrant—as embodied figure of the border that is categorised as “undocumented,” “irregular,” “alien” and, above all, “illegal”—occupies the fraught locus of the “outlaw,” a locus circumscribed by that nonnegotiable space of illegality that places them outside the reach of accountability jurisprudence. As the innumerable testimonies of the victims attest, in that outlaw space sexual violence is what can be perpetrated—by Border Patrol agents, correctional guards and traffickers—with normative impunity. Before the ever-present spectre of deportation, as the key weapon wielded by the aggressor against their victim, the “illegal” immigrant has always already been deported—from the very system of law that should ostensibly protect them.

Notes 1 Some of the content of this chapter was previously published in Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, “Sexual Violence and the Border: Colonial Genealogies of U.S. and Australian Immigration Detention Regimes” in Social and Legal Studies on 10 April 2018. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ full/10.1177/0964663918767954 2 The camps were officially closed in 2017–2018 but continued via various legal sleights for years longer. In 2020, close to 2,000 asylum seekers remain in various states of limbo, whether in Nauru, Papua New Guinea or in indefinite detention in Australia.

76  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

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Sexual violence and the border  77 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fernandez, Manny. 2019. “‘You have to pay with your body’: The hidden nightmare of sexual violence on the border.” New York Times, March 3. https://www. nytimes.com/2019/03/03/us/border-rapes-migrant-women.html (accessed 1 June 2021). Goldscheid, Julie. 2019. “Sexual assault by federal actors, #MeToo, and civil rights.” Washington Law Review 94, no. 4 (December): 1639–1696. Hall, Bianca. 2016. “Refugee battles for abortion after rape on Nauru.” Sydney Morning Herald, April 15. http://U.S.smh.com.au/federal-politics/politicalnews/refugee-battles-for-abortion-after-rape-on-nauru-20160414-go67o6.html (accessed 1 June 2021). Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self- Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2004. “The ‘new’ imperialism: Accumulation by dispossession.” Socialist Register 40: 63–87. Harvey, Gemima. 2016. “Australia’s two faces on violence against women.” http://U.S.asyluminsight.com/c-gemima-harvey/?rq=gemima#.V7-_zq1DJyj (accessed 1 June 2021). Heimer, Brady. 2015. “Excavating the sedimentations of slavery: The unfinished project of American abolition.” In Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, edited by Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman, 13–42. New York: Fordham University Press. James, Joy. 2015. “Life and other responsibilities.” In Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, edited by Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman, vii–ix. New York: Fordham University Press. Kidd, Rosalind. 2007. Hard Labour, Stolen Wages: National Report on Stolen Wages. Canberra: Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation. Kuo, Vivian and Jason Hanna. 2014. “Women allege sexual abuse at Texas immigrant detention centre.” CNN, October 4. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/03/ justice/texas-immigrant-detention-allegations/. Lethabo King, Tiffany. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. McGlade, Hannah. 2020. “‘Kaya Nidja Noongar Boodjah’ speech at Perth Black Lives Matter Protest, National Indigenous TV,” June 17. https://www.sbs. com.au/nitv/article/2020/06/17/kaya-nidja-noongar-boodjah-perth-black-livesmatter-rally-2020?fbclid=IwAR1ZLd5YzuNaBkVPR9Ivyy8X8tJT7WUnPBvW RmJ0VTTMv42RgcSPu5_R8RY (accessed 25 June 2021). O’Leary, Cristina Hunter. 2019. “Addressing the epidemic of sexual assault in California’s immigration detention centers.” CSW Policy Brief 25. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3t0126k9 (accessed 1 June 2021). Om, Jason. 2016. “Manus Island rape claims: Censored report shows immigration department ‘hiding something,’ MP Says.” ABC News, 3 June. http://U.S.abc. net.au/news/2016-06-02/immigration-dept-releases-report-into-alleged-manusisland-rape/7472370 (accessed 1 June 2021). Perera, Suvendrini and Joseph Pugliese. 2015. “Detainees on Nauru may have been ‘released,’ but they are not free.” The Conversation, October 6. https://

78  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese theconversation.com/detainees-on-nauru-may-have-beenreleased-but-they-arenot-free-48648 (accessed 1 June 2021). ———. 2018. “Between spectacle and secret: The politics of non-visibility and the performance of incompletion.” In Visualizing Human Rights edited by Jane Lydon. Perth: UWA Press, 85–99. Rentz, Catherine. 2011. “How much sexual abuse gets ‘lost in detention’?” PBS Frontline, October 19. http://U.S.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-much-sexualabuse-gets-lost-in-detention/ (accessed 1 June 2021). Rodriguez, Roberto. 2015. ‘“Not counting Mexicans or Indians’: The many tentacles of state violence against black-brown-indigenous communities.” Truth Out, February 4. http://U.S.truth-out.org/news/item/28921-not-counting-mexicansor-indians-the-many-tentacles-of-state-violence-against-black-brown-indigenouscommunities (accessed 1 June 2021). Seuffert, Nan. 2015. “Sexual minorities and proliferation of regulation in Australia’s asylum seeker detention camps.” Law Text Culture 19: 39–83. Sexton, Jared. Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Simmonds, Alecia. 2015. “Australia needs to own up to its slave history.” Sydney Morning Herald, April 28, 2015. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press. Speed, Shannon. 2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in Settler-Capitalist State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Spillers, Hortense J. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics 11, no. 1 (Summer): 64–81. ———. 2003. Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Starr, Alexandra. 2015. “At low pay, government hires immigrants held at detention centers.” NPR, July 23. http://U.S.npr.org/2015/07/23/425511981/at-low-paygovernment-hires-immigrants-held-at-detention-centers (accessed 1 June 2021). Tanzola, Cristian. 2019. “Barriers of being undocumented: Mexican women, U.S. immigration law, and the reporting of sexual assault and abuse.” Women’s History Theses and Capstones. 42. Accessed January 20. https://digitalcommons. slc.edu/womenhistory_etd/42. (accessed 1 June 2021). Tranter, Kellie. 2016. “There are still questions about pregnant refugee Abyan’s treatment. It’s time for an inquiry.” The Guardian, January 2. https://U.S.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2016/jan/02/pregnant-refugeeabyan-abortion-inquiry-nauru-immigration (accessed 1 June 2021). University College London. N.d. “Legacies of British slave-ownership.” Accessed January 19, 2021. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ (accessed 1 June 2021). Wildersen III, Frank B. 2010. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonists. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Part II

Making Indigenous women visible in the deathscape

Overview Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

Figure Part II.1 Julie Gough. Some of Our Women Kidnapped by Sealers, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist.

Julie Gough’s artwork, Some of our women kidnapped by sealers, is a stark catalogue of names. In this work, Gough commemorates the Indigenous Tasmanian women, including her own foremothers (Gough n.d.), who were taken by sealers to serve as enforced sexual and manual workers. A contemporary report to the Colonial Secretary describes this practice: they have also a custom of getting the Native Women of Van Diemen’s Land among them, who they mostly obtain by force and keep them as Slaves or Negroes, hunting and foraging for them, who they transfer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-8

Indigenous women in the deathscape  81 and dispose of from one to another as their own property; very few of whom ever see their Native Home, being away for numbers of years, and, if they do not comply with their desires or orders in hunting, etc., they by way of punishment half hang them, cut their heads with Clubs in a Shocking Manner, or flog them most unmercifully with Cats made of Kangaroo Sinews; several of them have from two to six women, who they claim as their own private property in this Manner. (Stewart 1815) This description of the “custom” of holding abducted Indigenous women as “Slaves or Negroes,” to be hunted and foraged for and for their masters to “transfer and dispose of” as their “private property,” underscores contemporary understanding of this violence as racialized in specific ways. As noted in Chapter 3, these forms of horrific and unbridled sexual violence operate as intersecting transnational formations of the settler colonial state, whose effects continue in the present. Gough’s artwork recalls a memorial plaque or commemorative inscription to those killed in a war, fighting to preserve their country. In its spare listing of names, it is equally in the tradition of contemporary campaigns to break the silence about the invisibilized casualties of colonial and racist violence: “Say Their Names.” The three chapters in this section, in their different ways, are contributions to naming the continuing violence of settler colonial violence in Australia and to saying the names of the First Nations women who are its casualties in multiple ways. Bronwyn Carlson (Chapter 4) and Hannah McGlade (Chapter 5) are also co-authors of the Deathscapes case study “Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State” which “documents the spaces and contexts in which Indigenous women die outside the formal custody of the state: on the streets; on the open road; in their own homes or at the edges of communities” (Allas et al. 2018). As the authors point out, in all these spaces “the violence of the settler state is enacted through diverse practices that render Indigenous women’s lives unsafe and produce their deaths.” The case study argues that “violence against Indigenous women’s bodies is integral to the project of settler colonialism; this structural violence, indeed, is what secures the continuing operations of the settler state, whether perpetrated inside or outside the formal custody of its institutions.” The use of the term femicide underlines that these incidences of Indigenous women’s deaths are “not accidental or random, but a systematic outcome of the logic of settler colonialism” (Allas et al. 2018). In Chapter 4, “Data Silence in the Settler Archive: Indigenous Femicide, Deathscapes and Social Media,” Bronwyn Carlson identifies two forms of killing silence that work in tandem with femicide in the settler state. The first is the persistent silence on the continuities between a (reluctantly acknowledged) frontier violence, including sexual violence, of the past, and the violence of the present: “the ‘past’ is neatly dissected so settlers just

82  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese have to deal with the present, which, according to the official national narrative, renders settlers blameless.” The second form of silence is the “symbolic annihilation” by which mainstream media sources deem stories relating to violence against Indigenous people, especially women and girls, to be unnewsworthy. In the face of this double silence, Carlson’s chapter discusses how “Indigenous people use social media to circulate and ‘keep alive’ stories of violence and death both as a means of resistance and also, as a commemorative archive that refuses the dictates of silence.” Through the forging of alternative networks of social media and a seizing of new technologies and platforms of communication, a growing community of Indigenous scholars and activists come together “to bring to life the lives and stories of the women, girls and non-binary people who have gone missing and to verify the circumstances and contexts in which their lives have been taken.” Through these means, as Carlson demonstrates, they succeed in the vital task of “building a digital record that challenges the silence in the settler archive and maps the ongoing gendered violence of settler colonialism.” Chapter 5, “‘Say her name’: Naming Aboriginal Women in the Justice System,” exemplifies precisely the critical work that Carlson identifies as necessary to “bring to life the lives and stories of the women … who have gone missing and to verify the circumstances and contexts in which their lives have been taken.” In this chapter, Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant document the stories of three Indigenous women in Western Australia, and the compound forms of violence in which they were enmeshed: Jody Gore, Tamica Mullaley and Ms Dhu. In all three instances—as in the case of Stacey Thorne, another murdered woman whose story they briefly discuss— the intimate violence experienced by the women intersects with state violence, compounded by the failure of the spectrum of state agencies to acknowledge, recognize and respond to it at the most minimal level. In each instance, as McGlade and Tarant document in painful detail, state agencies’ responses to the women were, at critical stages, shaped by a structure of destructive racist assumptions, reproduced through institutions including the courts, police, and the healthcare system, that in effect sanction and reproduce Indigenous femicide. The section concludes with legal scholar and poet Alison Whittaker’s searing poem, “Close the Inquest.” The poem follows family and community members as they walk in procession to a courtroom to await the coroner’s pronouncement on the death of a 36-year-old Wiradjuri woman, Ms Maher, in a police cell after she was taken into custody for drunkenness. Drawing on her extensive research (Whittaker 2020) on coroners’ reports into Indigenous people’s deaths in custody, Whittaker—and the listening courtroom—can anticipate the words the coroner will say (“drug use,” “criminal history” and “antibodies”) and those she will not: “racism” or “killed” Yet at the heart of Whittaker’s poem are images and memories that will not be effaced by the inquest’s failure and are “kept alive” against the silencing and invisibilizing practices of the femicidal state. They form

Indigenous women in the deathscape  83 part of the living counter-archive through which families and communities continue to enact memory and resistance: The smoke is readied near a placard of Ms Maher smiling on a brown lounge in a pink shirt. Like all photos on these placards, it was taken in the course of a life in the same way we’re all photographed by loved ones. So someone in a few years can say ‘Look how beautiful you are!’ or ‘Remember this?’ Not ‘Look how beautiful she was.’ or ‘Remember her’. *** We close this overview by noting the absence of a chapter that could not be included here, a proposed chapter on the “Administrative Disappearance” of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in the United States. This chapter could not be completed due to the depredations of the Covid pandemic on the author’s community which, like many other First Nations communities in North America, suffered disproportionate levels of infection and death. “The Color of Coronavirus” research by the APM Lab, for example, reveals that by early 2021 Indigenous Americans had suffered “the highest actual mortality rate of all racial and ethnic groups” in the United States (Lakhani 2021; see also Stimson, Chapter 13). We call attention to this missing chapter to mark, as an unfolding part of the Indigenous deathscape, the levels of loss, trauma and grief wrought by the pandemic among First Nations people in North America.

References Allas, Tess, Michelle Bui, Bronwyn Carlson, Pilar Kasat, Hannah McGlade, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2018. Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/indigenousfemicide-and-the-killing-state (accessed 1 June 2021). Gough, Julie. n.d. Biography. https://juliegough.net/brief-biography/ (accessed 15 July 2021). Lakhani, Nina. 2021. Exclusive: Indigenous Americans Dying from Covid at Twice the Rate of White Americans. Guardian, February 4. https://www.theguardian. com/us-news/2021/feb/04/native-americans-coronavirus-covid-death-rate (accessed 1 June 2021). Stewart, William. 1815. Report by William Stewart to the Colonial Secretary, Sydney, 28 September, 1815. Historical Records of Australia, Series 3, Vol. 2A: 575–576. Whittaker, Alison. 2020. Despite 432 Indigenous Deaths in Custody Since 1991, No One Has Ever Been Convicted. Racist Silence and Complicity Are To Blame. The Conversation, June 3. https://theconversation.com/despite-432-indigenousdeaths-in-custody-since-1991-no-one-has-ever-been-convicted-racist-silenceand-complicity-are-to-blame-139873 (accessed 1 June 2021)

4

Data silence in the settler archive Indigenous femicide, deathscapes and social media Bronwyn Carlson

Introduction The violence of the settler state is enacted through diverse practices that render Indigenous women, Indigenous transgender women, and non-binary lives unsafe and have resulted in their deaths. Rarely attracting mainstream media attention, public vigils or community outrage, the unlawful, unexpected and often violent killing of Indigenous people remains silent in the settler archive. While Australia and other settler colonial states generally, yet reluctantly, acknowledge that there were accounts of frontier violence, there has been a strategic move in official national narratives to represent this as historical, resulting in a widely held belief in the Australian settler state that colonisation happened a long time ago. This is a position that removes white Australia from culpability for “past” brutality. This view functions to sever the relationship between colonial violence (historical) and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism; the “past” is neatly dissected so settlers just have to deal with the present, which, according to the official national narrative, renders settlers blameless. The work of settler colonial studies scholars is useful in drawing attention to the difference between colonialism and settler colonialism. As noted by Veracini (2011), colonialism demands that colonised peoples work for the colonisers so their labour and resources are exploited whereas settler colonialism demands that the Indigenous population is eliminated. The “logic of elimination” following Wolfe (2006) plays out in many ways in the settler colonial nation known as Australia. One avenue is mainstream media, or as Johnston (2011, 104) asserts is “whitestream media,” where certain stories are deemed “newsworthy,” whereas others are routinely silenced, particularly those that relate to the violence experienced by Indigenous people, in what both Sandy O’Sullivan (2020, 111) and Rose Barrowcliffe (2021, 3) refer to as “symbolic annihilation.” Indigenous people use social media to circulate and “keep alive” stories of violence and death both as a means of resistance and also, as a commemorative archive that refuses the dictates of silence. Indigenous peoples utilise social media platforms to bring to life the lives and stories of the women, girls and non-binary people who have gone

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-9

Data silence in the settler archive  85 missing and to verify the circumstances and contexts in which their lives have been taken (Wilson and Zheng 2021). This activity is for the purpose of building a digital record that challenges the silence in the settler archive and maps the ongoing gendered violence of settler colonialism. Social media platforms in many ways, according to Barrowcliffe (2021, 4) “sidestep bias in mainstream media reporting by allowing Indigenous Australians to share their stories and activism in their own voice.” As I have argued elsewhere, Indigenous people strategically deploy technology available to us and find innovative ways of minimising the harm and the danger implicit in many of the sites that comprise online forums. In this process of re-making, we seize the ‘means of production’ and re-create it to our needs. (Carlson 2020, 116–117) Australia’s colonial history and the settler colonial state’s claim to sovereignty have long ensured the silencing of accounts of violence perpetrated on Indigenous bodies. Revisionist history, primarily by non-Indigenous historians, has made a contribution towards shifting colonial discourse to incorporate some of the atrocities enacted in the past. However, it is the work of Indigenous scholars that has unearthed and made visible and audible the state-sanctioned power of media silence that continues to build the nation according to its own settler narratives (see, for example, MoretonRobinson 2015). One of the more insidious acts of violence that continues to emerge from Indigenous Studies is the systemic and often brutal racial vilification of Indigenous girls, women and non-binary people that can, and

Figure 4.1 Paola Balla, Born into Sovereignty, Live in Sovereignty, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist. Screenshot from Deathscapes case study, “Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State.”

86  Bronwyn Carlson does, result in their disappearance. Information regarding this insidious form of violence emerges from Indigenous archives. Indigenous women and non-binary people suffer disproportionate levels of online violence that are invariably omitted from mainstream media’s ‘concern’ about sexism online (Bailey and Shayan 2016; Carlson and Frazer 2018a; Moeke-Pickering et al. 2021). Knowledge of missing, lost and murdered Indigenous people emerges through narratives that are absented from any mainstream stories that, in other populations, would undoubtedly engender national outrage (McQuire 2016; Cripps 2021; Barrowcliffe 2021; Moeke-Pickering et al. 2021). This deathscape of femicide is the cause of unspeakable trauma. In this chapter I map the social media archive emerging from Indigenous people online. As an Indigenous woman and scholar who is outraged by what I see as a deliberate omission in the settler archive, I attempt to give voice to this outrage and begin to document accounts of violence experienced by Indigenous people. I proceed to formulate this Indigenous record of digital history by applying four components: First, I will discuss the way in which Indigenous women have been represented historically as gendered subjects that experience racism, sexism and gendered violence that incurred little interest or outrage from white women or the broader public. Second, I look at our ability, despite attempts at genocide, to adapt to the trappings of colonisation, and currently, to engage with social media for a variety of uses and reasons. I discuss our access to it and our application of its formats. Third, I will provide accounts of lived experiences in this domain. It is here that I begin to unearth the archaeology of violence that expands on a daily basis. Finally, I will bring together these exposed silences, now audible and visible, and attempt to disrupt the legacy of colonialism as it continues to cause harm to Indigenous people. It is here that I will conclude what cannot be concluded by pointing to the ongoing work needed to maintain further vigilance and documentation.

The archaeology of violence: Indigenous bodies and their sexual(useful)ness In the colonial imagination and its attendant discourse, Indigenous bodies are categorised as the epitome of abjection; we are useful but expendable. We are the subjects of a well designed colonial system where bodies are assigned not only a position of desirabilty but also of value to the colonial project that places us, ambivalently, as desirable and undesirable. As Corrinne Sullivan (2018) notes, “Indigenous women do not fit the picture of a desirable sexual being, yet our identities are constructed based upon our very sexual(useful)ness” (397). This framing of Indigenous women as sexually useful yet dispensable provides an explanation for the lack of care or concern demonstrated in the public sphere when Indigenous women experience violent assaults and death. Our status as

Data silence in the settler archive  87 gendered subjects has always been differentiated in the public domain from that of non-Indigenous women to the degree that Indigenous women’s bodies invoke a unique and brutal form of misogyny that incurs little interest or judgement in the broader public domain. In a poignant example, a newspaper article published in 1984 cites 83-year-old Xavier Herbert, a Miles Franklin award winner revered as “an elder statesman of Australian literature.” Herbert boasts that he was “the biggest gin rooter around” while reminiscing how “stockmen used to go for a gin spree.” He states: We used to go up to Broome for our holidays and I knew, all through Western Australia, black velvet was the thing. It’s changed a lot in recent years but the perfect mate for the bushman was the black girl… The pearling industry was established in Broome and the pearlers used to go up into the Kimberley country and steal the young [Aboriginal] gins to work as pearl divers. Of course, they used to rape them, too, and when they got too pregnant they’d chuck them overboard. (cited in Ramsay 2008, np) This staggering public revealtion discloses a prevailing and historically entrenched pattern of acceptable violence toward Indigenous women that fails to ignite any form of public outrage. “Gin” and “Black velvet” are terms white men used to describe Indigenous women as “easy for the taking” (Hill 1943, 230). Conor (2015, np) describes these terms as “deriving from long established and expedient notions of colonised and enslaved women’s inherent lasciviousness.” During this period of colonial rule Indigenous women were regularly labelled immoral and indecent and considered a threat to the aspirations of white Australia because of the danger they supposedly posed in relation to immorality and prostitution and miscegenation (Horton 2010, 13). Sullivan (2018, 398) argues that “by entrenching the sexualisation of Indigenous women’s identities, colonial society enforced sexist ideologies and representations of Indigenous women as prostitutes, which sometimes led to our degradation and humiliation.” Australia has a lengthy history of constructing Indigenous women as sexual objects, which has amplified their sexualisation and dehumanisation. This history has resulted in Indigenous women’s lives being deemed less worthy than those of non-Indigenous women, and according to Jiwani and Young (2006, 895) such histories “continue to demarcate the boundaries of “respectability” and degeneracy, interlocking in ways that situate these women’s lives, even after death, in the margins.” As noted by Deer (2009, 150), “rape and sexual violence are deeply embedded in the colonial mindset. Rape is more than a metaphor for colonisation—it is part and parcel of colonisation.” All forms of colonial violence including sexual violence have been, and remain, common practices deeply embedded in colonial logic and manifest in the objectification

88  Bronwyn Carlson and dehumanisation of Indigenous women. The continuum of this violence is clearly identifiable in the nationalist mythology of the Australian bush: If you were to put rams in with ewes what would you expect?” one sheep farmer explained to the South Australia 1899 select committee adding that ‘men are placed in positions where for 10 or 15 years they never see a white woman. In the interior, there are a lot of these flash young lubras about, and you can hardly expect men not to touch them’. (cited in Conor 2015, np) In a particularly repugnant contemporary display of the same logic which was shared with me as part of my research on Indigenous people and dating apps, an Aboriginal woman in her 30s, who was engaged in a coversation on Tinder was told: “you black cunts are only good for fucking”. The person threatened to track down the woman’s location and sexually assault her, stating he would “fuck you in all your black holes” (Carlson 2019a, 13). As noted by Wilson (2015), colonisation has not only inflicted violence on the lands, on Indigenous cultures and identities, it has also engaged in a steady attack on Indigenous bodies. Colonial violence against Indigenous women according to Conor (2015, np) “was largely met with pervasive apathy, evasion, resignation, winking and looking the other way”. Smith (2015, 15) argues that Indigenous bodies have become marked as inherently “dirty” throughout the colonial process, thus made abject as “sexually violable and ‘rapeable.’” She argues that this perverse logic is extended so that the “rape of bodies that are considered inherently impure or dirty simply does not count.” Hannah McGlade points to the collaboration of state institutions to discursify colonial violence as unremarkable. She notes the internalising of this imposed ‘normativity’ that has engendered an inherent distrust of institutions: Black women know the Australian state was built on such violence and that the instruments of law, the police and courts, can never really be trusted to protect black women’s bodies. We know that the Australian legal system’s tolerance of sexual violence towards Indigenous women is deeply seated in Australian history. (McGlade cited in Allas et al. 2018) There is little empathy in Australia for Indigenous women who suffer violence and even death. In fact, there is a bland indifference and disinterest. As Amy McGuire argues, “The voices of Aboriginal women are hoarse from screaming into the abyss of Australian apathy” (2016, np). The “whitestream media” (Johnston 2011, 104) rarely reports on the violence perpetrated, let alone about the untimely and often violent deaths of Indigenous people. As McGuire (2016, np) argues, “if your only access to Aboriginal

Data silence in the settler archive  89 communities was though the media, you might believe there is a ‘devastating silence’ around the staggering rates of family violence in our communities.” Archival evidence is thus crucial in documenting the frequent and detailed accounts of both the colonial attitudes towards Aboriginal women, and their violent manifestations on our bodies.

“Ain’t I a woman?”: the absence of Indigenous women in the settler archive Chelsea Watego, speaking on the absence of Indigenous women’s inclusion on public conversation regarding International Women’s Day in 2021 highlights the absence of Indigenous women in the settler archive. The ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], Australia’s national broadcaster, hosted an event called “All about women,” on its flagship current affairs program, Q & A. Despite the title, they had no Indigenous women on the panel. After being initially invited, Watego was apparently “bumped” from the show and provided with an explanation that stated that the show was “looking less like a festival show & more like a focussed discussion on the probs of the Lib party” (Watego 2021a). Watego went on to tweet stating that she noted the event was still called “#AllAboutWomen which left me wondering ‘Ain’t I A woman?’” (Watego 2021a). Watego draws on the famous words of abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth who in 1851 posed the question “Ain’t I a woman?” emphasising the lack of inclusion of Black women in the women’s rights movement. Watego argues: The Indigenous woman, we are reminded, must know her place, even if she is busy getting her kids to school. She must wait her turn and she must only speak of matters that affect her, on their terms, to testify, rather than theorise. The Indigenous woman is only ever a subset of the category of woman when convenient, yet barely human let alone knowing; for we are primarily seen as an example of the oppression that settler women lay exclusive claims to knowing about, when it serves their interest (Watego 2021b, np). Other Indigenous people responded tweeting their outrage at the absence of Indigenous women’s voices on a day dedicated, apparently, to all women. Black women are often forgotten or deliberately excluded from the national conversation about women. Because if you can’t centre the tears of white women, is it even worth discussing? (BundjalungBud 2021) Reading #IWD2021 tweets & more than disappointed by the ongoing exclusion & marginalisation of Indigenous women in so much of the Australian #IWD messaging, advocacy, articles, amplifying & more, along with the indifference & racism #DoBetter. (BronFredericks 2021)

90  Bronwyn Carlson Social media platforms are useful. They provide a means where our voices can be public. We are avid social media users (Carlson and Frazer 2018a). Indigenous people across the globe are typically early adopters of digital technology (Indekofer-O’Sullivan 1995; Greenwood et al. 2011; Radoll 2012; O’Carroll 2013; Duarte 2017; Latimore et al. 2017; Carlson and Frazer 2018a; Carlson and Berglund 2021). We use digital technologies for our own ends, our own ‘systems’, for survival, connectivity, innovation and social and political interactions as well as for our own pleasure (Sweet et al. 2013; Carlson 2016; Farrell 2017: Carlson and Frazer 2018a; Carlson 2019b; Carlson and Berglund 2021). Over the last decade or so, social media technologies have gradually become a central part of our everyday lives. These forums offer opportunities to connect across vast distances and diverse populations, connecting us to a global network of Indigenous people. They provide a platform to express our identities, connect with our communities, to learn from each other and have fun—to play, to seek love, organise political action, find lost friends and family, search for employment, to seek help in times of need—and much more. Social media platforms have provided a public forum where we get to publish our thoughts, our support, our outrage and our care of each other. It is these digital platforms that afford us what mainstream media never has: The ability to speak to our truth. Indigenous people have made particular use of social media for agitating for social justice and for bringing our stories into the public domain (Carlson and Frazer 2016; Wilson et al. 2017; Carlson and Dreher 2018; Carlson and Berglund 2021). Digital technologies including social media have provided space where Indigenous led media can continue to thrive. IndigenousX1 is one such site. IndigenousX, founded by Luke Pearson in 2012, includes a Twitter handle (with an excess of 65,000 followers) and a site where articles are disseminated across social media platforms. The articles, authored by Indigenous people, are on topics of interest to us and our communities. Authors include well published Indigenous scholars and also artists, musician, comedians, students and all manner of individuals who have something to say. Social media also provide us with a means to publicly call out the way in which we are excluded from public debate. On International Women’s Day, Hannah McGlade posted on Facebook her concern about the lack of justice for Indigenous women who have been victims of violence and specifically about the deficiency of public concern or response: I asked the national body Our Watch to look at the murder of Stacey Thorne and recent acquittal case which raises real issues about justice and injustice for Aboriginal women. Our Watch said they do not comment on individual cases, and yet I see when it comes to non-Aboriginal victims Natasha Stott Despoja is commenting and calling out wrongful

Data silence in the settler archive  91 behaviour. Double standards and racism in the violence against women sector! (Posted on Hannah McGlade’s Facebook page and included with permission). McGlade is drawing attention to the murder of Ms Thorne who was a 35-year-old Indigenous woman (see also Chapter 6). She was 22 weeks pregnant when she was stabbed to death in 2007. The perpetrator, a nonIndigenous man, was found guilty in 2009. In 2010 he appealed his sentence which was rejected by the court. He was, however, granted a second appeal which is not very common. This was done in response to his defence raising concerns in relation to police fabricating evidence (Barrass 2018). In May 2020, he was found not guilty of murdering Ms Thorne and subsequently released from prison (Staff writers WAtoday 2020, np). McGlade raised the issue in a complaint sent to the ABC in relation to the absence of Indigenous women on their “About All Women” program. She wrote: It was very surprising to see the program last night ‘About All Women’ but which did not include the voices of any Indigenous women. The ABC has made a commitment to diversity that is actively undermined by programming that render Aboriginal women invisible. This has serious implications for Aboriginal women’s health, safety and wellbeing, Aboriginal women have long experienced racism from white women, including in the violence against women sector. We see for example, Our Watch refuse to comment on the murder of Stacey Thorne in Boddington claiming a policy that prohibits public comments on individual cases, but this policy does not apply if the victim is Hannah Clarke or Brittany Higgins. Can I suggest we now have a panel of all Indigenous women and we can also call it ‘About All Women’? (Email sent on March 5th 2021 from McGlade to Erin Vincent at the ABC, shared with permission) McGlade was referencing the public outrage over the alleged sexual assault of Brittany Higgins in the Australian Parliament House (see Haydar 2021) and the brutal murders of Hannah Clarke and her children (see Oriti 2020), both white women. McGlade also emailed a formal complaint to Our Watch in relation to the lack of public response to the violence perpetrated against Indigenous women that has led to their deaths. Our Watch advertises that they are the national leader in the primary prevention of violence against women and their children in Australia. 2 McGlade wrote: I am shocked and saddened to see that the supposed policy Our Watch has, not to comment on individual cases seems to be a policy that you apply when asked to comment on the cases of murder and injustice towards Indigenous women.

92  Bronwyn Carlson I asked Our Watch to form a position on the Stacey Thorne murder case and was told this was not possible because of the above-mentioned policy. I have since seen Our Watch comment on the murder of Hannah Clarke and the alleged sexual assault of Brittany Higgins. And yet Our Watch does not want to speak about the murder of Stacey Thorne which the WA authorities now wish to sweep under the carpet. The WA police and DPP believe and have advised there is still only one suspect… who is now likely to be paid compensation for incarceration. Significant evidence of his guilt remains unquestionable and yet he is being touted in legal circles as a case of wrongful conviction. I request my email be forwarded to your Indigenous advisory committee members for their close consideration (Email sent on March 5th 2021 from McGlade to Our Watch, shared with permission). The post led to an email conversation between McGlade, Marlene Longbottom and the author on the issue of violence against Indigenous women and the lack of public outrage or response. McGlade had not received a response from Our Watch when our conversation was initiated. We decided to write an open letter and share it across social media to raise our concerns and to draw attention to the issue of violence against Indigenous women that receives little response from mainstream media and peak organisations tasked with violence prevention. Indigenous women, tired of being silenced turned to social media to post about discontent: She has a name. She has a family. Her name is Stacey Thorne. She is another Aboriginal woman, who dies at the hands of a violent perpetrator. #IndigenousX (@Leesidge posted 21st November 2020). On this #IWD2021 have you heard of an Aboriginal woman by the name of Stacey Thorne who was murdered by former partner when she was 22 weeks pregnant? If you haven’t heard of her story, why do you think that is the case? (Longbottom 2021a). On 8 March, McGlade, Longbottom and the author posted an open letter on Twitter and Facebook calling for attention to the lack of response or concern to the killings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women (see Croakey 2021). The open letter called for people to sign and share across social media platforms. The letter including signatures would be sent to Our Watch. While the letter was shared hundreds of times and signed by thousands of individuals, no media outlet other than the independently owned, not for profit social enterprise Croakey Health Media bothered with the story. Croakey published the letter along with an introduction stating: Senior Aboriginal academics have called for the rights and concerns of Indigenous women to be central to national discussions about violence

Data silence in the settler archive  93 against women, and have called on Our Watch to appoint an Indigenous co-chair, alongside the current chair, Natasha Stott Despoja. The open letter, authored by Associate Professor Hannah McGlade, Professor Bronwyn Carlson and Dr Marlene Longbottom, contrasts the national attention to disclosures of sexual violence by white women “whereas sexual violence against Indigenous women and girls is being normalised and rendered invisible” (Doherty 2021, np). On 10 March 2021, Our Watch provided Croakey with a statement in response to the open letter where they stated their commitment to the prevention of violence against all women and including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. The response stated in part: Too often, the national conversation about violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women is sidelined. They continue to receive a fraction of the media coverage and public indignation they deserve. We take our national leadership role very seriously – we know we can’t do this work alone, that working in partnership with others is critical. This is something Our Watch is committed to and we will continue to not only listen and consult with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and experts but take action. Gender inequality, which drives violence, cannot be separated from other forms of oppression such as racism and the ongoing impacts of colonisation and dispossession (See Croakey 2021 for the full response). As a response to the open letter, Our Watch has been in contact with the authors and arranged a meeting. In one of their email replies, in relation to their statement provided to Croakey, they stated that they would prefer not to comment in the public arena. McGlade reminded them that she contacted Our Watch in December 2020 asking that they form a position on the Stacey Thorne murder case, which she believes involves many systemic issues, in particular, racism towards Aboriginal women in the justice system and in society, leading to very high rates of murder. McGlade in her communication noted that in Western Australia specifically, Aboriginal women are 17.5 times more likely to be murdered than non-Indigenous women. McGlade was informed again that Our Watch “does not comment on individual cases”. While Our Watch insisted that their chairperson and their organisation do not respond to individual cases, they have indeed made public statements as McGlade pointed out. The chairperson Natasha Stott Despoja spoke publicly about the Brittany Higgins sexual assault matter (see Haydar 2021) and the Hannah Clarke murder case and issue of coercive control (see Oriti 2020). As Barrowcliffe (2021, 5) argues, when Indigenous people raise their voices in protest to put forth their counter-narrative, whether that be online or in the streets, they are

94  Bronwyn Carlson maligned by the government and mainstream media or ignored by the institutions that claim to be working in support of reconciliation. Social media is useful to us. We use these platforms to generate narratives about the violence perpetrated against us that includes an account of our lived realities (Barrowcliffe 2021). The work Indigenous people do to “side step bias” and to give voice to our stories is exhausting. It also generates violence. Social media platforms are not necessarily safe spaces for Indigenous people as they present new dangers to our physical, emotional and cultural safety (Carlson and Frazer 2018b; Carlson 2019a, 2019b; Carlson and Frazer 2021). Violence against Indigenous women and Indigenous non-binary people is also “compounded by other structural forms of discrimination such as racism, ableism, or transphobia (among many)” (AWAVA 2020, 3). In Australia, the context and legacies of settler colonialism are significant to intersecting oppressions and discrimination faced by Indigenous people (Day 2020). The social context of gendered and racialized inequalities experienced by Indigenous people is reflected in an overrepresentation of experiences of family violence and abuse (Memmott et al. 2006, 7). The reliving and retelling of traumatic events and the retelling of our deaths has an impact. As I have argued previously, “traumatic events in the public domain act as reminders of ongoing colonialism,” leading to what I describe as trauma through “shared recognition” (Carlson et al. 2017). I apply this concept specifically to trauma related experiences where we, as a colonised collective, recognise and understand violence perpetrated against us as part of our day-to-day experience as colonised subjects. Quotes such as the following, posted by Alison Whittaker and Celeste Liddle, are testimonials to the anger and frustration experienced by Indigenous women in Australia and the fatigue that comes from the omnipresence of racism and violence: The settler justice system is nothing but a long queue of First Nations women holding photos of their dead kids (Whittaker 2019). We’re constantly stuck trying to remind white people of the humanity of Aboriginal people – particularly Aboriginal women and children. It’s tiring, devastating and as we continually end up back in the same place, clearly not working. Sort your shit out, Australia (Liddle 2021).

Why is there no outrage? As I write this chapter several events have taken place. The alleged rape of Brittany Higgins has resulted in much outrage on social media and particularly in response to the lack of action by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the revelation that the Defence Minister, Linda Reynolds called her a “lying cow” (Hitch 2021, np). Janine Hendry tweeted a call for action using

Data silence in the settler archive  95 the hashtags #March4Justice and #EnoughIsEnough. On 15 March 2020, that call to action was met with over 100,000 women taking to the streets to say enough is enough and violence against women needs to end (Boseley 2021). Indigenous women, Indigenous transgender women and non-binary people also marched. Wurundjeri woman Sue-Anne Hunter spoke about how Aboriginal people have for 233 years suffered gendered violence at the hands of colonisers: Aboriginal women have fought against gendered violence perpetrated by white men since day one. The allegations, cover up and silence on gendered violence in federal parliament is part of the same system of abuse and the same lack of legal and political consequences (Hunter 2021, np). Hunter, in her speech informed the crowds that this week, three Aboriginal people have died in custody. She asked, “How many of you have been outraged by this?” She went on to say that it has been 30 years since a Royal Commission was held into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Deaths in Custody in 1991. Since then, over 455 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody. Other Indigenous people on social media also questioned why the deaths of 455 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in custody has not resulted in public condemnation about a system that resulted in the untimely and often violent deaths of Indigenous people. A series of tweets by Kerry Klimm expressed Indigenous people’s righteous anger at the double standards that are painfully evident in the discourse that surrounds violence against women. This series of tweets was responding to the lack of attention or emotion around the violent death of Ms Dhu who, before her death in custody in 2014, was subjected to “unprofessional and inhumane” treatment by Western Australian police that was “well below the standards that should ordinarily be expected,” according to Coroner Ros Fogliani (cited in Wahlquist 2016, np; see also McGlade and Tarant, this volume). Moreton-Robertson (2015, xiii) argues that media, including social media, “usually portray Indigenous peoples in the deficit mode of humanity” which plays out in the public sphere through inclusion, exclusion, or how stories pertaining to us are presented. It clearly reflects power imbalances that often silence or distort presentations of some groups, while prioritising and legitimising the voices and lives of others: When women across Australia responded to the tragic death of Eurydice Dixon they said ‘it could be one of us’. When Ms Dhu died in jail for unpaid fines. Black women said ‘it could be one of us’. White women were silent. When women across Australia said ‘we should be safe around police and authorities’. White women were silent.

96  Bronwyn Carlson When women across Australia said ‘men have to respect women & stop committing these violent crimes’. When Black women said ‘police & authorities have to respect Aboriginal women & protect them not violate them’. White Australia was silent. When candles were lit, vigils held & politicians to talk show hosts cried & said ‘no more’ media held live crosses, front page headlines & Op Eds. When Black women & men protested in the streets & shouted ‘no more’. Media didn’t show up or reported on irate drivers held up in traffic. When men stepped up and said ‘women don’t need to change their behaviour. We do’. When police and authorities said ‘we did nothing wrong and no charges were laid for Ms Dhu slow and painful and preventable death’. White Australia was silent (Klimm 2018). In a similar vein, Aboriginal and Māori, Takatāpui person, Latoya Aroha Rule tweeted: “Imagine if white women surrounded Parliament House calling for justice for dead Black women” (@latoya_aroha post 19 March 2021). In thinking about the March 4 Justice in 2021, Rule reflected: I wondered for just a moment about gender; my own, its socio-political context, the expectations attached, and to be frank – how gender inequality sometimes feels like an oxymoron when positioned alongside race and class. Quite honestly, I question why people are fighting for gender equality between cis men and cis women when equality has not yet been achieved between Black and white women in the first instance, let alone women who are transgender and/or non-binary and gender non-conforming people (Rule 2021, np). Rule went on to state that Black women are subjugated in places like prisons and police cells and also spoke about the 1991 Royal Commission, noting that 11 of the 99 cases investigated were Aboriginal women. Rule revealed that the eldest of the 11 women was 58 when she died and the youngest only 14 (Rule 2021, np). Since then, Rule stated that there have been multiple other deaths of Aboriginal women in custody, and including one of the latest 3 to die in custody, a 44-year-old woman in Long Bay prison. In response the Corrective Services Minister Peter Severin commented that, her death “appears to be from unnatural causes… the woman has taken her own life and the notification was exactly the same as for any other deaths in custody. (cited in Cormack 2021, np) In an episode of the TV panel discussion program The Drum (15 March 2021), Amy McGuire responded to the comment that the death of this

Data silence in the settler archive  97 Aboriginal woman was because of “natural causes” stating that there is nothing natural about dying is custody: This language of natural causes and suicide, there is nothing natural about dying in custody. And the other point to make is so many Aboriginal people are being locked up for no crime at all, particularly Aboriginal women, many of them are on remand; many of them were just about to get out, and so I see all debates about, almost like victimblaming, they deserved it because they are locked up. No-one deserves that. These deaths are not natural and we are doing work to make that violence visible and we need Australia to be outraged. (McGuire speaking on The Drum 15th March 2021). In 2009 another Indigenous woman died in custody. Veronica Baxter, an Indigenous transgender woman who was being held on remand. Despite identifying as and living her life as a woman was held on remand in NSW Silverwater Metropolitan Reception and Remand Centre, a maximumsecurity jail for men. Baxter was denied access to hormone medication that was prescribed to her. The Deputy State Coroner Paul MacMahon said there was nothing to suggest any failure by the department contributed to the death (Gregoire 2020). MacMahon also placed a gag order in relation to reporting on the coronial inquest in effect allowing the violence of settler colonialism to “cover its tracks” (Veracini 2011, 3). The then president of the Indigenous Social Justice Association’ (ISJA) the late Uncle Ray Jackson was highly critical of the inquest and the accompanying gag order raising questions as to why the coroner hadn’t looked into whether Baxter had been supplied with her hormone treatment. Following the inquest, Sydney gender activist Norrie remarked, “If trans people are not given their hormones, they can become suicidal” (Gregoire 2020, np). Similar to the call by McGlade to investigate the perpetrators of these untimely and violent deaths, McGuire also calls for a closer inspection of perpetrators and the circumstances leading up to the deaths of Indigenous women. This includes settler colonial institutions such as the corrective services. It is these institutions that must be held accountable because they are the ones who have the responsibility of care of Indigenous people in custody. As McGuire argues, “the deaths at the hands of the justice system are seen as legitimate, and Australia for the whole part doesn’t care” (McGuire speaking on The Drum 15 March 2021). McGuire, like other Indigenous people is outraged at the lack of care or concern when there is a death of an Indigenous person, in custody, in their homes or on the streets. She argues: There are deliberate attempts to stop any form of justice for Aboriginal families and we see there’s been an uphill battle in order to get the little semblance of justice that we have in some cases. For the most part,

98  Bronwyn Carlson there’s an obscuring of accountability completely. When we talk about deaths in custody we talk all of the deaths, all of the numbers but never the perpetrators. You know, I think that is one of the key parts, there’s an obscuring of the perpetrators because when an Aboriginal person goes into custody they’re automatically seen as criminals, they’re automatically seen as ‘less than’, they’re automatically seen as inhuman. (McGuire speaking on The Drum 15th March 2021). Tabitha Lean, who openly discusses her incarceration and home detention which she refers to as “open air prison,” tweeted: Dear non-Aboriginal people, two more of my people have been killed in custody…in your system…a system which functions in your name to keep people like you safe from people like me – when the fuck are you going to stand up and say enough. When will our lives matter? (Lean 2021). Lean calls the public’s attention to carceral violence and states that she is committed to “elevating the voices” of Indigenous people who have been and are incarcerated. Lean does this because she is invested in stopping what she argues is the “brutalising and killing of her own people in the colonial frontier that is the criminal justice system.”3 McGuire argues that there isn’t even an attempt to conceal the violence perpetrated on Indigenous people and comments on the evidence that so much CCTV footage has revealed. The absence of outrage is because there is a lack of viewing Indigenous people as human. McGuire stresses, “Australians deliberately do not want to see it and sometimes they cannot see it, because they have been conditioned to believe the violence perpetrated against us is legitimate, so they can’t see it” (McGuire speaking on The Drum 15 March 2021). When there is any mainstream media coverage that relates to the deaths of Indigenous people it is arguably offensive, misinformed and inevitably positions Indigenous people in derogatory ways; colonial discourse has been effective in its representations of Indigenous people. In 2011, for instance, an Aboriginal woman, Ms Daley bled to death on a beach after being violently and sexually assaulted by two non-Indigenous men. The common news headline theme stated: “‘Wild sex’ led to woman’s death” (Ccalcino 2014; see also Allas et al. 2018). The details are too horrific to mention, other than to say that the implication of the headline was that consent was not required. There was no public outrage. There were no vigils. Indigenous people however, expressed their outrage and sorrow on social media. Marlene Longbottom tweeted: The ’all lives matter’ rhetoric ignores the experiences of violence against Aboriginal women. Again marginalised, thru the one in all collective narrative based on gender, omits the racialized experiences

Data silence in the settler archive  99 when focusing on #VAW thus #MSDALEY’s death is ignored & silenced (Longbottom 2021b). And years earlier the same outrage and sorrow: Honouring our sisters #MsDhu #MsMaher #MsAmos #MsDaley #MsHart Aboriginal Australian women who have died as a result of violence by the state or individuals (Longbottom 2017) I pause momentarily to reflect on the continuing media coverage and its accompanying national outcry regarding recent cases of sexual assault on white women in Australia and to note the stark differences in representation afforded to Indigenous women. I do so not in disrespect or lack of care for the former, but to register my—and other Indigenous people’s— outrage, our indignation and anger, our fear of sexism and misogyny, and racialized violence—our reality. Indigenous people are killed with no public outrage and they are then “unworthy of mourning, unworthy of grief and fundamentally unworthy of justice” (McGuire speaking on The Drum 15 March 2021). As I end this chapter the Aboriginal Legal Service tweeted the devastating news that in as little as two weeks a fourth Indigenous person has died in custody. We are very sorry to share the tragic news that another Aboriginal person has died in custody… Our thoughts are with his family at this devastating time (Aboriginal Legal Service 2021). Now as I submit this chapter for final review, Indigenous people have taken to social media to inform us that sadly another person has died in custody. This is the fifth Indigenous person to die in custody in the last month. Another death in custody with just a week out of the 30th anniversary of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Prison is a death sentence (Meriki Onus 2021). As noted at the outset, any conclusion to this deathscape of violence perpetrated daily on the bodies of Indigenous people is not yet possible. In the context of the continuity, and indeed, expansion of colonial discourse, Indigenous people remain abject in a system that simply does not care beyond an occasional nod to our grief and suffering. Social media, however, despite its conspicuous corporatist—and colonialist—objectives, provides us with platforms we are able to seize and utilise for our own ends. These sites are where we will continue to document our deathscape archive. This is not a solution, but it is part of a solution for so many of us who have been silenced and are now refusing that (im)position.

100 Bronwyn Carlson

Notes 1 For more information on IndigenousX see, https://indigenousx.com.au 2 For more about Our Watch see, https://www.ourwatch.org.au/about-us/ 3 Seminar: ‘Abolition on Indigenous land: alternative futures and criminology’s role’ hosted by the University of Melbourne, https://events.unimelb.edu.au/ arts/event/9525-1

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Data silence in the settler archive  101 Carlson, Bronwyn. 2020 “Indigenous killjoys negotiating the labyrinth of dis/ mistrust.” In Critical Reflections and Politics on Advancing Women in the Academy, edited by Taima Moeke-Pickering, Sheila Cote-Meek, and Ann Pegoraro, 105–123. Pennsylvania: IGI Global. Carlson, Bronwyn, and Ryan Frazer. 2016. “Indigenous activism and social media: The global response to #SOSBLAKAUSTRALIA.” In Rethinking Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest, and Culture, edited by Anthony McCosker, Sonja Vivienne, and Amelia Johns, 115–130. London: Rowan and Littlefield International. Carlson, Bronwyn, and Jeff Berglund, eds. 2021. Indigenous People Rise Up: The Global Ascendancy of Social Media Activism. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press. Carlson, Bronwyn, and Ryan Frazer. 2018a. “Social media mob: Being Indigenous online.” Sydney: Macquarie University. https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/ publications/social-media-mob-being-indigenous-online Carlson, Bronwyn, and Ryan Frazer. 2018b. “Cyberbullying and Indigenous youth: A review of the literature.” Commissioned by the Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council of NSW, Sydney: Macquarie University. Carlson, Bronwyn, and Tanja Dreher. 2018. “Introduction: Indigenous innovation in social media.” Media International Australia 169, no. 1: 16–20. https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1329878X18803798 Carlson, Bronwyn, Lani V. Jones, Michelle Harris, Nelia Quezada, and Ryan Frazer. 2017. “Trauma, shared recognition and Indigenous resistance on social media,” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 21. https://journal.acs. org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/1570 Conor, Liz. 2015. “‘Easy for the taking’: Rape and race in Australia.” New Matilda. April 14, 2025. https://newmatilda.com/2015/04/14/easy-taking-rapeand-race-australia/ Cormack, Lucy. 2021. “’Every death in custody is a tragedy’: Two Indigenous inmates dead in the past two weeks.” Sydney Morning Herald. March 9. https:// www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/every-death-in-custody-is-a-tragedy-twoindigenous-inmates-dead-in-the-past-week-20210309-p5790m.html Cripps, Kyllie. 2021. “Media constructions of Indigenous women in sexual assault cases: reflections from Australia and Canada.” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 33: 300–321. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10345329. 2020.1867039 Croakey. 2021. “An open letter in response to the lack of public concern or response to the killings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.” Croakey Health News. March 9. https://www.croakey.org/an-open-letter-in-response-tothe-lack-of-public-concern-or-response-to-the-killings-of-aboriginal-and-torresstrait-islander-women/ Day, Madi. 2020. “Indigenist origins: Institutionalizing indigenous queer and trans studies in Australia.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 7, no. 3: 367–373. https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/7/3/367/166950/IndigenistOriginsInstitutionalizing-Indigenous Deer, Sarah. 2009. “Decolonizing rape law: A Native feminist synthesis of safety and sovereignty.” Wicazo Sa Review 24 no. 2: 149-167. Doherty, Linda. 2021. “Introduction by Croakey.” Croakey Health Media. March 9, 2021. https://www.croakey.org/an-open-letter-in-response-to-the-lack-ofpublic-concern-or-response-to-the-killings-of-aboriginal-and-torres-straitislander-women/

102  Bronwyn Carlson Duarte, Marisa Elena. 2017. “Connected activism: Indigenous uses of social media for shaping political change.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 21. https://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/1525 Farrell, Andrew. 2017. “Archiving the Aboriginal rainbow: Building an Aboriginal LGBTIQ portal.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 21. https:// journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/1589 Fredericks, Bronwyn. (@BronFredericks). 2021. “Reading #IWD2021 tweets & more than disappointed by the ongoing exclusion & marginalisation of Indigenous women in so much of the Australian #IWD messaging, advocacy, articles, amplifying & more, along with the indifference & racism #DoBetter” Tweeted March 5, 2021. https://twitter.com/BronFredericks Greenwood, Janinka, Lynne Harata Te Aika, and Niki Davis. 2011. “Creating Virtual Marae: An examination of how digital technologies have been adopted by Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. In International Exploration of Technology Equity and the Digital Divide: Critical, Historical and Social Perspectives, edited by Patricia Randolph Leigh, 58–79. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Gregoire, Paul. 2020. “Veronica Baxter’s death in custody: A trans women neglected in a male prison.” Sydney Criminal Lawyers. October 6. https:// www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/veronica-baxters-death-in-custodya-trans-woman-neglected-in-a-male-prison/ Haydar, Nour. 2021. “Government has ‘demonstrably failed’ in its response to rape allegations says Natasha Stott Despoja.” ABCNews. March 5. https://www.abc.net. au/news/2021-03-05/christian-porter-rape-allegations-stott-despoja/13217858 Hill, Ernestine. 1943. The Great Australian Loneliness. Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens. Hitch, Georgia. 2021. “Defence Minister Linda Reynolds apologies to Brittany Higgins for calling her a ‘lying cow’.” ABCNews. March 5. https://www. abc.net.au/news/2021-03-05/linda-reynolds-apologises-to-brittany-higginslying-cow/13219796 Horton, Jessica. 2010. “The case of Elsie Barrett: Aboriginal women, sexuality and the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines.” Journal of Australian Studies 34 no. 1: 1-18. Hunter, Sue-Anne. 2021. “Aboriginal women have fought against gendered violence by perpetrated by white men since day one.” Women’s Agenda. https:// womensagenda.com.au/latest/aboriginal-women-have-fought-against-genderedviolence-perpetrated-by-white-men-since-day-one/ Indekofer-O’Sullivan, Sandy. 1995. “Geta.new@dress: Artists inhabiting cyberspace.” Object: Craft Council of NSW Publication 11, no. 95: 28–32. Jiwani, Yasmin, and Mary Lynn Young. 2006. “Missing and murdered women: Reproducing marginality in news discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 4. https://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1825 Johnston, Daniel Morley. 2011. “From the tomahawk chop to the road block: Discourse savagism in whitestream media.” American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 1: 104–134. Klimm, Kerry. (@flashblak). 2018. “When women across Australia responded to the tragic death of Eurydice Dixon they said ‘it could be one of us’. When Ms Dhu died in jail for unpaid fines. Black women said ‘it could be one of us’. White women were silent.” Tweeted June 20, 2018. https://twitter.com/flashblak/ status/1009330730839695361

Data silence in the settler archive  103 Latimore, Jack, David Nolan, Margaret Simons, and Elyas Khan. 2017. “Reassembling the Indigenous public sphere.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 21. https://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/1529 Lean, Tabitha. (@haveachattabs). 2021. “Dear non-Aboriginal people, two more of my people have been killed in custody…in your system…a system which functions in your name to keep people like you safe from people like me – when the fuck are you going to stand up and say enough. When will our lives matter?” Tweeted March 10. https://twitter.com/haveachattabs/status/1369584017 851355140 Liddle, Celeste. (@Utopiana). 2021. “We’re constantly stuck trying to remind white people of the humanity of Aboriginal people – particularly Aboriginal women and children. It’s tiring, devastating and as we continually end up back in the same place, clearly not working. Sort your shit out, Australia.” Tweeted September 17, 2018. https://newmatilda.com/2018/09/18/ soft-white-underbelly-discussing-racism-trigger-much-anger/ Longbottom, Marlene (@DrMLongbottom). 2017. “Honouring our sisters #MsDhu #MsMaher #MsAmos #MsDaley #MsHart Aboriginal Australian women who have died as a result of violence by the state or individuals.” Twitter post November 21. https://twitter.com/DrMLongbottom/status/932928872361836544 Longbottom, Marlene (@DrMLongbottom). 2021a. “On this #IWD2021 have you heard of an Aboriginal woman by the name of Stacey Thorne who was murdered by former partner when she was 22 weeks pregnant? If you haven’t heard of her story, why do you think that is the case?” Twitter post March 8. https://twitter. com/DrMLongbottom/status/1368747358805102595 Longbottom, Marlene (@DrMLongbottom). 2021b. “The ’all lives matter’ rhetoric ignores the experiences of violence against Aboriginal women. Again marginalised, thru the one in all collective narrative based on gender, omits the racialized experiences when focusing on #VAW thus #MSDALEY’s death is ignored & silenced.” Twitter post June 20, 2018. https://twitter.com/DrMLongbottom/ status/1009267294600511488 McGuire, Amy. 2016. “If you think Aboriginal women are silent about domestic violence, you’re not listening.” The Guardian. October 5, 2016. https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/05/if-you-think-aboriginal-womenare-silent-about-domestic-violence-youre-not-listening McGuire, Amy. 2021. The Drum. March 15. https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2021-03-15/the-drum-monday-march-15/13250940 Memmott, Paul, Catherine Chambers, Carroll Go-Sam, and Linda Thomson. 2006. “Good practice in Indigenous family violence prevention: designing and evaluating successful programs.” Australian Domestic and Family Violence Clearinghouse. https://www.indigenousjustice.gov.au/resources/good-practicein-indigenous-family-violence-prevention-designing-and-evaluating-successfulprograms/ Moeke-Pickering, Taima, Julia Rowat, Shiela Cote-Meek, and Ann Pegoraro. 2021. “Indigenous social media activism using Twitter: Amplifying voices using #MMIWG.” In Indigenous People Rise Up: The Global Ascendancy of Social Media Activism, edited by Bronwyn Carlson and Jeff Berglund. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

104  Bronwyn Carlson O’Carroll, Acushla. 2013. “Virtual Whanaungatanga: Māori utilizing social networking sites to attain and maintain relationships.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 9, no. 3: 230–245. O’Sullivan, Sandy. 2019. “A lived experience of Aboriginal knowledges and perspectives: How cultural wisdom saved my life.” In Practice Wisdom, 107–112. Brill Sense. Onus, Meriki (@MerikiKO). 2021. “Another death in custody with just a week out of the 30th anniversary of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Prison is a death sentence.” Twitter post April 4. https://twitter.com/ MerikiKO/status/1378628727236534274 Oriti, Thomas. 2020. “Violence against women and children is preventable: Stott Despoja.” ABC The World Today. February 20. https://www.abc.net.au/ radio/programs/worldtoday/violence-against-women-and-children-preventable:stott-despoja/11983578 Radoll, Peter. 2012. “Information and communication technologies in the classroom: Implications and considerations.” In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education: An Introduction for the Teaching Profession, edited by Kaye Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramsay, Alan. 2008. “Weasel words won’t hide monstrous shame.” The Sydney Morning Herald. February 2, 2008. https://www.smh.com.au/national/weaselwords-wont-hide-monstrous-shame-20080202-gdrzda.html Rule, Latoya Aroha. (@latoya_aroha). 2021. “Imagine if white women surrounded Parliament House calling for justice for dead Black women” Twitter post March 19. https://twitter.com/latoya_aroha/status/1369564888239013889 Smith, Andrea. 2015. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Staff Writers. 2020. “Scott Austic found not guilty of murdering pregnant lover Stacey Thorne after Supreme Court retrial.” WAtoday. November 20. https:// www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/scott-austic-found-not-guiltyof-murdering-pregnant-lover-after-retrial-20201120-p56gmq.html Sullivan, Corrinne. T. 2018. “Indigenous Australian women’s colonial intimacies: Positioning Indigenous women’s agency.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 20, no. 4: 397–410. Sweet, Melissa, Luke Pearson, and Pat Dudgeon. 2013. “@ IndigenousX: A case study of community-led innovation in digital media.” Media International Australia 149, no. 1: 104–111. Thorpe, Nakari. 2018. “Why are Aboriginal women in Australia hit with racism and sexual threats for sharing their views?” NITV. February 6. https://www. sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/explainer/why-are-aboriginal-women-australia-hitracism-and-sexual-threats-sharing-their-views Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “Introducing: Settler colonial studies.” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1: 1–12. Wahlquist, Calla. 2016. “’We’ve got to put our story out there’: Ms Dhu’s family prepare for verdict on death in custody.” The Guardian. December 15, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/15/weve-got-to-putour-story-out-there-ms-dhus-family-prepare-for-verdict-on-death-in-custody Watego, Chelsea. (@drcwatego). 2021a. “I was told last nights show was ‘looking less like a festival show & more like a focussed discussion on the probs of the Lib party’ it was initially linked to syndeyoperahouse.com/festivals/allabout-women.html but I note it was still called #AllAboutWomen which left me

Data silence in the settler archive  105 wondering ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’. Tweeted March 5, 2021). https://twitter.com/ drcwatego/status/1367560372366970880 Watego, Chelsea. 2021b. “This International Women’s Day, where are the Indigenous voices.” Sydney Morning Herald. March 7. https://www.smh. com.au/national/this-international-women-s-day-where-are-the-indigenousvoices-20210307-p578ih.html?fbclid=IwAR0F708O4xSNwHN-z-FOpaFyH_ V5SQptTKfHJKadKC90s_9Av8Su_e-Hw7o Whittaker, Alison. (@AJ_Whittaker). 2019. “The settler justice system is nothing but a long queue of First Nations women holding photos of their dead kids” Tweeted posted November 22. https://twitter.com/AJ_Whittaker Wilson, Alex. 2015. “Our coming in stories: Cree identity, body sovereignty and gender self-determination.” Journal of Global Indigeneity 1, no. 1: 1–5. http:// ro.uow.edu.au/jgi/vol1/iss1/4 Wilson, Alex, Bronwyn Lee Carlson, and Acushla Sciascia. 2017. “Reterritorialising social media: Indigenous people rise up.” Australasian Journal of Information Systems 21. https://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/1591/781 Wilson, Alex, and Corals Zheng. 2021. “Shifting social media and the idle no more movement.” In Indigenous People Rise Up: The Global Ascendancy of Social Media Activism, edited by Bronwyn Carlson, and Jeff Berglund. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4: 387–409.

5

“Say her name” Naming Aboriginal women in the justice system Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant

Black Lives Matter is a powerful international movement highlighting the violence of the state towards Black and Indigenous peoples worldwide. In Australia, it has renewed attention to Aboriginal deaths in custody and police killings of Indigenous people. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADC) (1987–1991) inquired into the circumstances of Aboriginal deaths in police and prison custody, and the underlying causes of over-incarceration, but did not stem the tide of deaths in custody nor Indigenous incarceration, which has doubled since it made 300 recommendations to address over-incarceration. Many of the recommendations remain unimplemented to this day, and there has been little political commitment shown to a 2018 Inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission, “Pathways to Justice” which also made significant recommendations, and unlike the RCIADC, properly included the situation of Indigenous women who are particularly over-represented in Australian women’s prisons. Various coronial inquests have also proven to have little impact. And although a recent inquest into the death of Tanya Day acknowledged systemic racism for the first time, it failed to hold anyone to account for her treatment and subsequent death in custody (Wahlquist 2020). With more than 400 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the RCIADC’s final report, no police or prison officer has ever been found guilty of a criminal offence, although two officers are now charged with murder following shooting deaths of Aboriginal people. This chapter highlights the violence experienced by Aboriginal women at the hands of the “justice” system using case studies from West Australia (WA), which shamefully records the highest number of Aboriginal deaths in custody and incarceration. Aboriginal incarceration in WA reflects a deeply entrenched ongoing pattern of colonial violence that can be aptly described as mass incarceration, a “system of racialized punishment, underpinning the settler state … a most vicious cycle, one that violently abuses and takes black lives without apparent sanction” (McGlade 2020, 285). We also draw from the international campaign #Say Her Name that brings to light the fact that women of colour are the victims of police and structural violence,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-10

Say her name  107

Figure 5.1 Known Deaths and Disappearances of Indigenous Women in Their Homes. Screenshot from Deathscapes case study, “Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State.”

albeit that their lives and deaths are often ignored and rendered invisible by white society and its institutions, including the law.

Say her name: Jody Gore In 2015, in WA, Jody Gore was charged with the homicide of her long-time partner-friend, her de facto Damian Jones (The State of Western Australia v Gore (WASC, 327 of 2015), Transcript (“Tr”), 399). She raised selfdefence but was unsuccessful, convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a 12-year minimum. Her three children were taken from her, and it was known that she would probably die in prison because of her chronic illness. In 2019, following a concerted campaign led by Hannah McGlade, intensive media exposure and the commencement of work on a legal appeal, Jody was released pursuant to a royal prerogative of mercy determined by the WA Attorney General (McGlade 2019). She had spent four years in prison and while her sentence was commuted, her murder conviction stands, and at the time of writing, only one of her children has been returned to her. Here we demonstrate the violence, racism and state sanctioned institutional entrapment that Jody experienced as an Aboriginal woman that led both to Damian’s death and her wrongful conviction. Jody is the Nanna of her three school aged children. She went to school in Wyndham, and later worked as a childcare worker, kindergarten teacher,

108  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant night patrol officer, high school canteen worker, camp cook and shop assistant and at Waringarri Radio Station (Tr, 372–373). She had been employed all her life, either in paid employment or, since 2009, as the Nanna of her children. Like so many Aboriginal women, she is the mainstay of her home (Watson 2007; Huggins 2018), providing rhythm and security for her children, and running their home on an extremely low income. At her trial Jody’s relationship with her children was described as “fostering,” as though she was somehow not quite her children’s Nanna, despite her caring for her children full-time, week in, week out, year in, year out, as their Nanna (Tr, 7). Jody met Damian in 1994 on Aboriginal country near Wyndham and Kununurra (Tr, 373). He was born in Wyndham. They lived together with Jody’s parents for a couple of years (Tr, 373), then in about 1998 went to live in Dillon Springs, a dry community, where Damian worked on a CEPD (state run Community Employment and Development) scheme (Tr, 375). For much more of their relationship, Jody and Damian lived in Kununurra and Wyndham, which are not dry communities. Jody was the main breadwinner (Tr, 375). Damian was un/underemployed and dependent on alcohol and using other drugs in a self-harmful way from an early age. When they were both earning money Jody and David “chucked in” (Tr, 375), sharing finances, but Damian often didn’t have money. He was “greedy to me …. When it’s [his turn to give], he give me then he (indistinct) again and so I give it back to him” (Tr, 375). If Damian wanted Jody’s money he took it. “If I say ‘No, I’ve got no money’. I don’t give him, will get angry” and punched her, “real hard” (Tr, 370, 385, 424). Damian used violence against Jody from early in their relationship (Tr, 374), commonly when she resisted him stealing her money or when he felt “jealous” (Tr, 374, 378). Her body records his attacks. For example: He hit me with a belt. My face was all swollen here. So there was a friend in the house as well, beside me and the deceased ….. So I quickly—when he went in the kitchen, I pushed the window out and jumped out in a rush, the both of us, to go—we went to the backpackers there to the nearest telephone. And as—we went there to call the police … [My face] was purple, pink, black, busted up. Both cheeks. [He] hit me with a belt, buckle part (Tr, 376–377). One place in Wyndham. I was back home and he was drinking. He came back and he argued me, and dropped me to the ground and he was dragging—pulling me by the hair. And next minute he was on top of me, just rolling around, and he has tried to pull my eye out. But my brother came along, … and called out his name—the deceased’s name—and he heard his name—heard his voice and he got up and ran (indistinct) Yes (Tr, 377).

Say her name  109 Wyndham Warrior Reserve. It’s called Warrior Reserve. I was sitting at the barrel shed there and I was standing at—he was talking to me, you know, he’s (indistinct) and he king hit me twice real hard at close quarter. He put a hole here to my [lips and chin] One on this side, one on this side (Tr, 378). Damian punched Jody in the face and head and “picked up rocks and hit me in the head” (Tr, 379). “He’s a crack shot … He always hitting the target, that’s me” (Tr, 406). According to Ayton et al. (2019, 1), “traumatic brain injury” (TBI) is “damage to or alteration of brain function due to a blow or force to the head … and can be acute or cumulative (over months or years).” Little is known about TBIs in the context of family violence but they are likely to be prevalent and are certainly underreported (Ayton et al. 2019; Wilson 2019, 28). Jody gave evidence at the trial about the effect of these attacks: “when I get punched in the head I get memory loss” (Tr, 402, 379), yet the likelihood that Jody has brain injuries from these attacks has never been investigated. Jody’s head came up to Damian’s shoulder, he was younger than her and strong (Tr, 248–250, 377). Damian developed a psychiatric illness while imprisoned in Perth for three months in 2003 for traffic offences. “[W]hen he came out he was sick” for “the first time.” “He had a mental illness. Schizophrenia” (Tr, 380). After this his violence against Jody became even more terrifying, when he was “hearing voices” (Tr, 380); “schizo” (Tr, 378). Like many Aboriginal men, and women, he lived with a mental disability (Human Rights Watch 2020) and was violent towards Jody with what Broun (1995, 43) called “boots frustrated and dispossessed” by colonisation. It is important to see that Jody was left to care for Damian. At her trial, it was assumed their relationship had “ended” in 2009, but Damian continued to rely on Jody and also abuse her. Until his death he returned to her for accommodation and for money (Tr, 385–386, 422). State government agencies also relied on Jody to assist with and manage his behaviours. Jody was reluctant to ask for police help because, even at best, criminal justice responses address incidences of violence, they are not designed to manage the kind of circumstances Jody faced: ongoing risk (New Zealand Family Violence Death Review Committee 2016, 23–33; Tarrant et al. 2019, 20). Moreover, Jody knew that incarceration had devastated Damian, making him unwell and more dangerous, putting her at greater risk from him. Despite these concerns, she did need urgent police help, on a number of occasions, for example in 2012, when refuge records that were not obtained at trial showed police considered Damian’s problem was “mental health” not justice, so they couldn’t help Jody (Hennessey 2019). State health services also relied on Jody. Two days before

110  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant the killing a state health service asked Jody to take Damian back to live with her because she was the one who could best look after him (Psych Report 2016, [15]). Then on the day of the killing, Damian again stole her money, attacking her viciously when she resisted and his dominating dependency and extreme violence against Jody was very much embedded in her life. Neither family chastisement (Tr, 256, 377, 383–384, 423) nor state agency could or would stop his patterns of abusive behaviour. If anything, the state minimised and rendered invisible the life-threatening violence she was experiencing from him over the course of many years and leading up to the fatal incident. There was no claim or evidence that Jody had ever victimised or assaulted Damian. Jody did not hit him with the buckle of a belt, try to gouge his eyes out or king hit him, felling him with one blow; she didn’t throw rocks hard hitting him repeatedly in his head. She didn’t steal his money and attack him viciously if he refused to hand it over. Jody had no psychiatric illness or chaotic and terrifying behaviour. Damian did not flee from Jody to neighbours, strangers, the police or a family violence refuge with his children. No state agency knew that he ran from Jody scared for his life while at the same time relying on him to manage her erratic and violent behaviour that he was the target of. It is clear that Jody’s family, the community, the local women’s refuge, mental health workers and police all knew she was the victim of ongoing violence in her relationship with Damian. How, then, did Jody become the aggressor at her trial, the murderer? Not only that, how did she become the example to set, to show how the criminal justice system would not tolerate drunken aggression? When sentencing Jody, the sentencing judge Lindy Jenkins increased her sentence to deter others: there is “far too much drunken violence in the Kimberley” (The State of Western Australia v Gore 2016, [45]); not severe violence against Jody, and the life-threatening violence known to be endemic and severe to Aboriginal women, but violence perpetrated by the likes of her, a respected caring Aboriginal Nanna who had been victimised for many years without any support of agencies. We have written elsewhere about how the state’s participation in producing Damian’s individualised violence against Jody (by its racialized violence against him, including his incarceration) was ignored at trial and could therefore play no part in assessing Jody’s claim that she was entrapped and defended herself (Douglas et al. 2020). In the remainder of this section, we explain two more ways in which Jody’s experiences as an Aboriginal woman, and therefore her claim of self-defence, was “invisibilised.” Jody’s experience in this respect reflects widespread disregard to Aboriginal women’s intersectional identity, which negates Indigenous women’s experiences and justice claims, and legal rights (McGlade 2012). Aboriginal women are asserting that race and gender are relevant and intersecting at all times, as Irene Watson has aptly stated: ‘the emancipation of Aboriginal women

Say her name  111 will come once we have dismantled patriarchy, and also the colonial institutions patriarchy has assembled along the course of its own history’ (cited in McGlade 2012, 93). 1 The state turned its justice arguments against Jody In some jurisdictions, including WA West Australia, where Jody was tried, the “partial” defence of provocation for murder has been abolished (Criminal Law Amendment (Homicide) Act 2008, s8). This resulted from feminist advocacy that demonstrated the gender bias in the law’s structure and application (Victorian Law Reform Commission 2004; Law Reform Commission of Western Australia [LRCWA] 2007, Chs 4 and 6), but Aboriginal women went unheard. At common law the defence of provocation reduces a murder conviction to a lesser manslaughter conviction where a person “lost self-control” in a way that was said to be excusable due to extraordinary pressures. Feminist advocacy argued against the injustices of a justice system in which men who killed their intimate partners were partially excused merely because they were “jealous.” On the other hand, women who killed their partners in response to egregious, prolonged violence against themselves or their children were only recently even permitted to raise the defence of provocation, and then with difficulty, because of their frequently “delayed” response (R v R 1981; R v Chhay 1994; Tarrant 1996; LRCWA 2007, 214–216). In other words, it was argued that women responding to egregious intimate partner violence are defending themselves, not merely, suddenly, “losing control.” This meant that, in jurisdictions where provocation has been abolished, the only defences effectively available in this context are based on the idea of defence. Moreover, implicit assumptions operate in the application of these defences, including in Jody’s case, that a woman must be frightened to act in self-defence and that anger precludes self-defence, when neither of those assumptions are required by the law or accord with women’s experiences (Criminal Code (WA), s248; Law Commission 2004, [3.85], [3.93], [3.98]–[3.99]). Similarly, the false dichotomy, victim/agent, is misleading for women facing family violence (Stubbs and Tolmie 2008, 141–143). Jody not only derived no benefit from this reform but was punished by losing access to a provocation defence, even if that defence would have been wrong in its depiction of her. Despite Jody’s persistent evidence at trial that she was frightened of Damian’s attacks, including his attack on the day she stabbed him (Tr, 378, 396, 413), that she ran from him (Tr, 376–377, 378), called for help and sought police protection (Tr, 256, 276ff, 381–382), resorted to a family violence refuge (Hennessey 2019), and talked him down from terrifying states (Tr, 378), the state asserted that Jody was “angry” not frightened (Tr, 412–413). To make these assertions, the state relied on stereotypes about (the absence of) gendered “passivity”: and about “fighting

112  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant back,” stereotypes that are more readily assigned to Aboriginal women (Stubbs and Tolmie 2008, 141–143). Aboriginal women are also subjected to racist stereotyping, including the “Angry black woman” that underlines racial profiling of Indigenous women as offenders and increasing Aboriginal women’s increasing incarceration (Australian Law Reform Commission 2018, Ch 11). Despite the fact that it was undisputed that Damian stole Jody’s money and punched her in the face when she resisted his theft, the state argues a case about a mutual “fist-fight” in which Jody gave as good as she got. For example, “The argument was physical with each of them punching the other” (Tr, 65), “…. then the two of them, standing up, punching each other” (Tr, 70). “So how many people were punching each other at that time?” (Tr, 215). “Who threw the first punch” (Tr, 235). “Okay. So he’s standing and the accused is sitting down and she stands up and they’re punching each other” (Tr, 236). The state successfully constructed a picture of an “angry,” resentful Aboriginal woman, a provoked aggressor, in order to disprove Jody’s claim of self-defence, while Jody could no longer rely on a defence of provocation. The jury was reminded a number of times that “provocation is not a defence to murder” (Tr, 68, 72, 454). Thus, consistent with other law reforms related to women’s access to homicide defences (Stubbs and Tolmie 1995) the abolition of provocation as a partial defence was advocated for as a justice claim relevant for white, non-Aboriginal women victimised by intimate partner violence. That those claims not only did not relate to Aboriginal women’s lives but would result in further exclusions from the protections of the law, and further incarceration, for Aboriginal women was ignored. 2 The state transformed Jody’s connectedness into incomprehensibility Witnesses at Jody’s trial were interwoven by family and country, threads in a whole (Kwaymullina 2005). All witnesses, other than non-Aboriginal professionals were connected to others and all witnesses were connected to someone connected to Jody and to Damian. One state witness’s sister, son, daughter in law and niece gave evidence, as did her sister in law who is Jody’s grandmother. One witness was Jody’s and Damian’s cousin and another was Jody’s mother’s cousin. It is not uncommon for witnesses to be related in domestic homicide trials, but the connectedness is more often greater for Aboriginal communities, who are very closely related not only amongst people but by responsibilities for country (Watson 2014, 69).1 This connectedness means there is intense trauma experienced by the participants in the trial itself. One witness, Jody’s mother’s cousin, described as “a relative of Jody” even though all the witnesses were, was

Say her name  113 unable to move. Her court support worker said, “I have never seen anyone respond so strongly to giving evidence … I have never witnessed anyone respond like she did … she froze. She shook. She could not move” (Tr, 189). But Jody’s connectedness to community and land, and to Damian was re-written as confusion and incomprehensibility. Jody was seen as an undifferentiated member of her community, as if the state couldn’t see who she was amongst a crowd. For example, in a bail application before the commencement of the trial the prosecutor referred to the witnesses as all being “interrelated to each other in some way, shape or form” (Tr, 8) and, as noted above, Jody carried the responsibility for ‘her community’s’ violence in her sentence. Importantly, integral to the transformation from connectedness to incomprehensibility and confusion, was the overwhelming focus on alcohol and intoxication. Freeman et al. write: Both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ use of alcohol and policy responses to address it are linked to Australia’s history of colonisation. …. European settlers brought with them the practice of heavy drinking and used alcohol as wages and to control and trade with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. When heavy drinking by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people began to produce visible harms, the Europeans prohibited the supply of alcohol to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Langton recounts how the European constructed the colonial stereotype of the “drunken Aborigine.” (Freeman et al. 2019, 532; BlakBusiness 2020) At Jody’s trial, the Aboriginal witnesses were persistently questioned about how much alcohol they had drunk, at what time of the day they began drinking, how “intoxicated” they were and also who “threw the first punch.” The state’s case against Jody was that she was befuddled and disordered through drink and therefore misperceived what Damian was doing. “… you have never stabbed him before, have you? … and the reason you stabbed him this time was because you were drunk?” (Tr, 408). … being drunk you misunderstood what he was doing … because you were drunk you thought he was going to attack you? … if you had been sober you would not have thought that? … and you would not have stabbed him? (Tr, 408) Jody answered these leading questions to say that she wouldn’t have stabbed him had she not been drunk, but not because she would have mistakenly believed Damian was going to attack her but because she would have suffered another attack without recourse (Tr, 408).

114  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant Moreover, it was not only the state’s case that was based on alcohol; Jody’s defence was also limited to intoxication. The first question asked by defence counsel in cross-examination of all lay state witnesses except two (six out of eight) was about their state of intoxication; questions to the effect of whether they were too drunk to be sure they saw what they said they saw Jody do in the few moments before the killing. Of the other two state witnesses, one hadn’t drunk anything; the first question she was asked in cross examination challenged her capacity to hear what she said she’d heard Jody say. The last state witness gave evidence that was favourable to Jody, so she was cross-examined by defence counsel to play down her intoxication, and the state characterised her evidence as unreliable because of intoxication. This intense focus on intoxication made Jody not a member of her community connected by family and country, or a person aggressed against by another member of her community and in need of protection. Rather she was a participant in what was seen as her community’s disorder and endemic violence. Her Aboriginal values and relations (her connectedness to community and country) were at the same time erased and transformed, to become the cause of chaos. In this way the very space of the court was active in the ongoing operations of colonial violence. Inaccurate assumptions that are made about the mutuality of violence in a non-Aboriginal woman’s intimate partnership (Coates and Wade 2007, 513–514) extended to a presumed mutuality within Jody’s whole community. Consistent with Langton’s idea that “[w]hites are made innocent of the destruction of Aboriginal society because the Aborigines are ‘drinking themselves to death’” (1993, 195), the intense focus on intoxication at Jody’s trial was made the reason for the stabbing, and swamped her claim to justice. Moreover, the effect of this focus on intoxication can be seen to directly distort the application of the law. Focus on the to-and-fro argument about the witnesses’ drunkenness facilitated the confinement by the state of its sole legal focus to the moments before the killing. The state’s only argument against self-defence concerned these few moments. It argued that Jody could not have been acting in self-defence because she had already retrieved her money, she walked a few metres to get the kitchen knife from her bag, and had others around to help (Tr, 402–413). “The State’s case is that at the time of the stabbing the deceased was not doing any harmful act and was not threatening to do one in the immediate future” (Tr, 456). But even if all that state evidence were accepted, it is incapable of addressing Jody’s claim that she was defending herself against ongoing violence. No amount of intoxication distorted Jody’s, or others’, knowledge of that ongoing violence or the intricate and ongoing ways in which she managed the risks of it. This is a claim Jody was entitled to rely on, and it was side-stepped by the state. Her ongoing management of Damian’s violence and his devastated wellbeing was rendered non-existent and ignored, contrary to

Say her name  115 fundamental principles of the common law, including equality before the law and the rule of law, all of which are contained in the law of self-defence.

Say her name: Tamica Mullaley and baby Charlie Tamica Mullaley is from the Kimberley town of Broome in the state’s far north, she was a young mother who suffered the unspeakable when her much loved baby Charlie (ten months old) was abducted and murdered. Tamica and Charlie’s case was so shocking, and should have gained national media attention, but it did not, and received little public attention. This case outline draws from Jess Hill’s book See What You Made Me Do (2019). Hill’s investigation also followed advocacy by Hannah McGlade, concerned by Tamica’s case, and the grave injustice and risk that Aboriginal women and children encounter in the legal system. It was March 2013 and Tamica had been with her family celebrating her father Ted’s birthday, she’d not long been seeing Mervyn and was worried about rumours he was cheating on her. After the party, she tried to speak to Mervyn, but he became angry, and as she tried to walk home with her baby he attacked her, according to Tamica “He just went right off, punching me – I tried to get away but he just came up behind me and bashed me more. That’s when he really hurt me and stripped me naked” (Hill 2019, 306). A nurse at home heard Tamica’s screams and saw her being bashed, she intervened calling on him to stop and calling for urgent police help. Tamica’s father Ted was also called and arrived soon after to find his daughter badly beaten, bloodied and wrapped in a sheet. The police arrived next but Tamica did not want to speak to them, which was understandable as she had been violently assaulted and had no clothing on. Tamica told the police “Go away, nobody wants you here” (Hill 2019, 306) and swore at them because she knew they did not have a very good reputation in Broome and was embarrassed “being naked with blood everywhere” (Hill 2019, 307). The police refused to leave and insisted on interviewing Tamica immediately even though she had been badly beaten, stripped naked of her clothes and was bleeding with visible injuries as a result. They insisted on interviewing her even though there was a witness to the assault and her father was also present and able to give details about the perpetrator. The police clearly refused to treat Tamica as a victim, questioning her against her wishes, and when she was badly injured and in no state to be speaking to them. Their conduct to Tamica reflected racial prejudice that is frequently experienced by Aboriginal women who are seen and responded to as aggressor or perpetrator rather than victim. In Tamica’s own words, I was completely battered and bruised, he hit me all over my head and everything. So yeah, I didn’t want to talk to police. I just wanted him charged, and for me to get in the car and go home. (Hill 2019, 307)

116  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant Tamica should have been supported to seek medical help, but when they would not leave her alone, in her distress, and holding her baby, she spat at one of the officers. Constable Paul Moore pursued her and pinned her to the ground forcing his knee in her back. In a state of shock and fear, Tamica managed to lock herself in her father’s ute with police then smashing the vehicle’s windows, arresting her and throwing her into the police wagon. Ted called out that his daughter needed an ambulance, and hospital attention, but was ignored by the attending officers’ intent on arresting Tamica, an injured, beaten and naked, young Indigenous woman. The police also showed little concern for the safety of baby Charlie, leaving him with two young girls on the street to look after. Ted made sure that Tamica went to the hospital and was seen by a doctor—her injuries were life-threatening, and included a lacerated kidney, severe bruising to her spleen and internal bleeding. According to Ted, “The doctor said if she hadn’t gone to hospital, she would have died in her cell” (Hill 2019, 308). As soon as she had treatment Ted went back to find Charlie but soon discovered that Mervyn Bell had abducted Charlie. Ted found a police car stationed outside the hospital and begged Constable Eoin Cameron to help him locate Charlie. Ted was very worried about Charlie’s safety and feared Mervyn would kill him, but the officer refused to help stating that police had no resources and had to remain at the hospital to guard Tamica as she was under arrest! Ted went quickly to the police station to report Charlie’s abduction, but Acting Sergeant Darren Connor on duty refused to assist and later even claimed that Ted was intoxicated and aggressive at the station. According to Ted: “I hadn’t had a drink for thirty years! So that was totally wrong, it’s just the way he looked at it: I was just another blackfella drunk” (Hill 2019, 309). As the Broome police would not help, Ted had no option but to contact 000 telling the operator, “I want someone to take me serious that this guy is going to kill my grandson” (Hill 2019, 309). The operator called the Broome police station and spoke to Constable Joel Wright who claimed that Ted was wasting police time. Driving around town looking for his grandson, Ted received a chilling phone message from Bell, he returned to the police station and begged police again to help him find Charlie but once again they refused. The police followed him shining a torchlight on him and telling him not to bother them again. The next day police still had taken no action to find Charlie. Ted and Tamica knew he had left town with Charlie and had received a report of his whereabouts, which police also failed to act on. It was more than 13 hours after Charlie was abducted that they finally broadcast an alert to the local districts. Soon after, Mervyn Bell pulled into a roadhouse 800 kilometres south of Broome carrying baby Charlie, who had died from horrific injuries, burns, abrasions, broken bones, bruising, internal bleeding, injury to his genitals. Bell was later found guilty of the rape and murder of Charlie

Say her name  117 in 2014, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and killed himself in prison in 2015. Notwithstanding that the police displayed shocking racism and mistreatment of Tamica, Charlie and Ted, they continued to prosecute Tamica and Ted and this grievous course of conduct was condoned by the Magistrate Stephen Sharratt, who found Tamica guilty as she was “in control of her senses” (Hill 2019, 315). His reasoning was nonsensical, referring to Tamica being worried her baby would see her bloodied and injured, and failing to consider the life-threatening injuries she sustained in an extremely violent assault by her intimate partner. Tamica may well have died that night if left without medical treatment, and this finding by the Magistrate reaffirms the police behaviour and their inherently racist conduct that failed to recognise and respect her as a victim of a violent assault. The Magistrate also distorts this by claiming that a suspended sentence is “merciful,” at the same time as also convicting and fining her father Ted who sought to protect her and his grandson, baby Charlie (Hill 2019, 315). The WA Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) investigated police response to the Mullaley family in 2013 finding that Broome police failed to respond to Tamica as a victim of an assault, even though they were informed prior to attending that Tamica had been seriously assaulted, noting her presenting condition included visible injuries and suggested she clearly had been assaulted: “her condition suggested she clearly was the victim of a serious assault” (CCC 2016, 5). The police made no efforts to locate Bell and charge him with assaulting Tamica and although they had contact with the hospital, where Tamica had been released on bail for medical care, they made no inquiry as to her injuries, which were life threatening. As noted by the CCC report, the Broome hospital staff also failed to report the assault to police (even though Tamica had provided the information of the assault to them) and failed their own domestic violence policy mandated by the WA Health department (CCC 2016, 5). Nor did Broome police make a missing person report for baby Charlie, rather they failed to take any further information about his abduction and also appear to have fabricated evidence, claiming Ted called them to say that he had spoken with Mervyn and that “Bell loves the child and is caring for him well” (CCC 2016, 13). Ted, and Tamica, who discharged herself against medical advice on learning of her baby’s abduction, knew that Mervyn had made threats to kill the baby and were doing everything they could to find him, including having family in Perth urgently assist them. Sgt Darren Connors also reported (six months later) that Ted was affected by alcohol or substance and aggressive and irrational when reporting Charlie’s abduction, but this was not supported by the video footage where the CCC report notes that Ted is animated, and also calm and friendly to police (CCC 2016, 13). Ted himself has publicly stated that he has abstained from alcohol for over a decade.

118  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant The CCC report acknowledged there were police failures that contributed to a delayed and ineffective response, but this was not sufficient to establish serious misconduct on the part of officers involved. They described Tamica as “uncooperative and aggressive” saying this contributed to police failures, effectively laying blame on Tamica, a mother so violently assaulted she could have died; a mother wrapped in nothing but a sheet and being approached by two non-Aboriginal police officers, one a male. This finding inherently contradicts the known facts which they acknowledged: That police were attempting to interview her although she presented in a condition that “suggested she was the victim of a serious assault” (Hill 2019, 5). No consideration is given to the reasons as to why police departed from proper standards or the racism that was clearly shown by their conduct. The CCC, who are known to have a very poor relationship with the Aboriginal community in WA and who were advised by a parliamentary inquiry to improve such relationships (Joint Standing Committee on the Corruption and Crime Commission 2020, 69–70), are also keen to find that Mervyn Bell was the person solely responsible for Charlie’s murder, exonerating the police of any real responsibility although their shocking and discriminatory conduct played a key role in his abduction and murder—and was most certainly serious misconduct. The Mullaley family subsequently sought an inquest into the circumstances of Charlie’s death, but Justice Rene Le Miere of the WA Supreme Court found in 2020 that there was no evidence that police contributed to Charlie’s death. Nor was he “satisfied it is necessary or desirable in the interests of justice to order that [an] inquest be held” (Menagh et al. 2020). Tamica responded by pointing out that police had made her baby’s life so vulnerable: The police left my baby at the scene without asking about his safety. The police refused to look for my baby when I told them he had been abducted. It is clear to me that little black lives don’t matter in WA. … This is another slap in the face for me and my family and it’s just heartbreaking. (Menagh et al. 2020) The Attorney General, Mr John Quigley, a former police union lawyer who once defended the off-duty police officers acquitted of the murder of young John Pat2 in Roebourne, refused to comment on this case. The Mullaley family later requested a parliamentary inquiry into Charlie’s death, noting this had been agreed to by the AG for a case involving the murder of a non-Aboriginal family on compassionate grounds as they were not able to gain an inquest, but their request was also denied by the AG. The family are now pursuing a federal court claim of race discrimination against the Broome police involved in Charlie’s death, according to Ted Mullaley: “We don’t want this to happen to anyone else just because you come from

Say her name  119 the wrong side of the street, or because you’re Indigenous” (Chrysanthos 2019). The impact of baby Charlie’s murder on Tamica has been severe but notwithstanding she continues to fight for justice for him: “We’re doing this because we need justice and the police need to be held accountable for not looking for my son” (Chrysanthos 2019).

Say her name: Ms Dhu Ms Dhu was a young Aboriginal woman from the Pilbara region of West Australia who died a shocking death in a police cell after being arrested and detained for the minor offence ‘non-payment of fines’ (Bui et al. 2017). She had been assaulted by her partner prior to the arrest and had pled for help and medical attention but was instead racially stigmatised by both police and medical staff as she died in their custody at just age 22 years. Ms Dhu’s death on 2 August 2014 became a rallying cry for Black Lives and Aboriginal deaths in custody across the nation. The circumstances of her death were later the subject of a Coronial Inquest involving numerous witnesses, including the police on duty and the medical staff involved, and an examination of the CCTV footage which showed her in a dying state, begging for help in her cell, with her cries being ignored and even ridiculed by those charged with her protection. According to the WA Coroner, Ms Dhu’s appearance during a two-day incarceration indicated she was “increasingly unwell” culminating in her collapsing. Yet police had formed a view she was exaggerating and feigning illness (Record into the Death of Ms Dhu 2016, [6], [454]). This view was accepted by the medical staff, doctors and nurses at the local health campus, who failed to undertake the most basic medical procedures and yet declared that she was “fit for custody” (Record into the Death of Ms Dhu 2016, [592], [613]), thereby releasing her to the cells and depriving her of the urgent medical attention she required. According to the Coroner’s report, Ms Dhu had accumulated fines for low level offending, such as swearing in a public place, and had also began a relationship with Dion Ruffin (17 years her senior) whom her family disapproved of, and she was experiencing domestic violence in the relationship. Ms Dhu had been earlier assaulted by Dion which caused a fracture to her ribs, although she did not feel safe to disclose that to the Geraldton Regional hospital where she attended for help. At the time of her arrest, she was making her way to the hospital for treatment, being in pain, but was stopped and arrested by police. She was detained without any real consideration of her presentation, even though Ruffin was arrested at the same time (Record into the Death of Ms Dhu 2016, [12]–[20]). Aboriginal women in West Australia, and across the nation, suffer extremely high rates of family violence and homicide, yet white police and hospital staff dismissed Ms Dhu’s pain and own telling of her symptoms as feigned and untrustworthy. Within two days she had died in police custody,

120  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant for an offence that the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in Custody recommended more than two decades earlier, be abolished. This law was finally repealed in 2020 (some 30 years after the recommendation of the Royal Commission) while other key recommendations such as the establishment of an Aboriginal Justice Committee and Aboriginal justice plans, continue to be ignored. The Coroner’s report makes a number of recommendations aimed largely at WA police and their practices, including cultural competency training for police and the Custody Notification Service (CNS) allowing for improved advocacy for all Aboriginal people taken into police custody. However, the issue of racism and prejudice at the heart of Ms Dhu’s treatment by police and medical professionals was ignored and remains unaddressed. The conduct of police and medical staff is variously described as “cruel,” “inhumane” and “unprofessional” by the Coroner who also noted that the CCTV footage “was profoundly disturbing” showing Ms Dhu was treated by some police officers “as if she were an object, as if she were invisible, and without regard for her dignity as a fellow human being” (Record into the Death of Ms Dhu 2016, [454]). The Coroner notes Article 10(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that provides: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” She failed to acknowledge that this appalling behaviour showed racism, and that was done to Ms Dhu because she was Aboriginal. As such it stands as a breach of both domestic and international human rights obligations, especially the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Australia is a signatory to. The case of Ms Dhu has been reimagined as the subject of an Indigenous judgement where McGlade, assuming the identity of “Coroner McGlade,” and Commentator Suvendrini Perera call for truth telling and accountability on the part of the state to Indigenous women who experience femicide in this country (Bui et al. 2017; McGlade 2021; Perera 2021). As the Indigenous judgement of the case makes clear, the racist and violent circumstances of Ms Dhu’s death, at the hands of police (and medical officers) were “whitewashed” by the inquest because it failed to acknowledge the obvious racialized conduct, and thereby rendered it invisible. Recommendations that officers engage in “cultural awareness training” is not an appropriate response to racism and discrimination, especially where such conduct causes a death. No officers were held to account in any serious way for Ms Dhu’s death; they did not lose their jobs; and they certainly were not charged. No medical officers were sacked although their willingness to be complicit in racism against a vulnerable young woman resulted in her loss of life. Coroner McGlade’s Indigenous judgement calls for criminal charges against those involved in Ms Dhu’s death as a form of accountability and justice in the name of all Indigenous women suffering racialized violence in

Say her name  121 Australia today. As made evident in the Deathscapes Indigenous Femicide Deathscapes case study, we recognise that Indigenous women’s deaths are not accidental or random. They are: a systematic outcome of the logic of settler colonialism. These are deaths that implicate a state’s entire non-Indigenous citizenry in the crime of Indigenous femicide. … The settler prerogative to use, abuse and kill Indigenous women is embedded in the colonial state’s gendered and racialised relations and structures of power. Indigenous femicide constitutes an identifiable and criminal dimension of the settler state’s genocidal logic of elimination. (Allas et al. 2018)

Conclusion Indigenous women and men are facing individualised and systemic racial violence from state institutions, including the law and “justice” processes, on a daily basis. Jody, Tamica and Ms Dhu lived their lives trying to manage that violence in ways non-Indigenous women and men find difficult even to imagine (Huggins 2018). The violence they faced was a matter of life and death, and they fought against it with all their considerable resources up until the deaths each of them encountered—and then, with their families and communities, they continue to fight. The state agencies and law, by behaving as though Indigenous women don’t exist by ignoring them in public discussion and before the law, enact deeply racialized violence. Indigenous women are disappeared by being treated as if they are so powerless, stupid and worthless that they can be murdered and disappeared in body. Saying their names is an act of resistance and a form of keeping them with us. Ms Dhu lost her life, Tamica lost her baby’s life and Jody was put in prison to die without her children. Many Aboriginal mothers have been murdered. In WA the murder rate of Aboriginal mothers is 17.5 times that of non-Aboriginal mothers. And yet the state has consistently refused to respond appropriately to prevent and address this violence. And, of course, what is done to Indigenous women is done to their children and communities. “Their knowledge matters, every day, to ensuring the health and wellbeing of our children, families, and communities” (Australian Human Rights Commission 2020, 10). The experiences of Jody, Tamica and Ms Dhu show how layered are the aggressions that Indigenous women face. They were treated as angry violent Black women whose incarceration and confinement were more important than their lives. They faced terrible violence from their partners: violence the state is implicated in producing and refusing to manage. When Jody defended herself she became an aggressor against the state, was made an example of drunken Aboriginal violence, and left to

122  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant finish her life in a prison. The state ignored the violence that Tamica was subject to when she was instantly detained as an aggressor against the state, while her baby was left to be murdered. And when Ms Dhu sought medical help for grievous injuries, she too was ambushed by the state, and lost her life. At the time of writing, the family of Noongar woman Stacey Thorne, murdered at 22 weeks pregnant in Boddington in 2009, are reeling from the recent acquittal of Scott Austic for her murder. Austic, a non-Aboriginal man, had not wanted Stacey to have his baby, and was reported to be ashamed to be having intimate sexual relations with her as an Aboriginal woman. Considerable forensic evidence of his guilt led to his original imprisonment for murder. Supported by prominent non-Aboriginal men and women, and non-Indigenous media, Austic and his supporters convinced a jury (one that included no Aboriginal people) of the WA Supreme Court that he was “framed”— i.e., a heroic innocent man deserving of compensation. Aboriginal women have issued an Open Letter to denounce the lack of attention to and concern over Stacey Thorne’s murder, now considered an open or unsolved case—as compared to national attention and outrage to murder and rape of non-Aboriginal women, including allegedly, rape by a current servicing Attorney General. McGlade and the Thorne family are also petitioning the WA Legislative Council to release the 2013 CCC Inquiry into the police investigation into Stacey Thorne’s murder and calling for an Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous women and girls in the state of WA. In this chapter we have demonstrated through the cases, and the lives and deaths of Aboriginal women and children, the racialized and systemic violence they experienced from the law which denied them any respect and human rights and caused great suffering to them, their families and communities. These cases are also relevant to the increasing interests in new laws supporting the criminalisation of coercive control and the risk such laws, and approaches based on carceral feminism, pose to Indigenous women, who are routinely stereotyped and racially profiled as the aggressors, not as women worthy of legal protection or human rights. They demonstrate the need for substantial structural reforms that recognise Indigenous leadership on violence against women and including a specific national action plan on violence towards Indigenous women and children, to allow for responses that acknowledge Aboriginal women’s intersectional identity, social entrapment and systemic racism, including in the justice system. We acknowledge and honour the First Nations women and children we speak of and stand in solidarity with, and whose families have called for justice amidst the pain of their suffering. We close with a powerful song by the Pilbara Aboriginal girls’ choir in memory of Ms Dhu, naming the racism that killed her “so deep it’s beyond institutionalised,” and asking in the spirit of resistance “Did Dhu die for nothing? No She didn’t.”3 The Aboriginal girls, kin of Ms Dhu, like her grandmother Carol Roe who campaigned for years for

Say her name 123 justice in her name, are reminding this country that Aboriginal women and girls will not go quietly, be disappeared without resistance, as they poignantly affirm: ‘We’re not going away, this is our home, this is our home’!

Notes 1 Watson (2014, 69) writes, “As a Nunga I am not contained by my body. We are the law, we are all things in the natural world, and we are our ngaitji and the ruwe. The law lives inside me as I live inside of ruwe and my ngaitji. The law connects us to all things. My identity evolves from ruwe. In general, first meetings with other Nungas involve a protocol, which is to introduce one’s self in relation to the country of the grandmothers and grandfathers, to identify where each person comes from, and who your people, kin and family are. It is one of our ways. Our relationship to country determines how we speak to one another and to whom, and how we are in relation to ruwe and the law” (Watson 2014, 69). 2 The death of John Pat sparked the Australian Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 1987–1991. 3 The video can be accessed at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-10/ the-cat-empire-member-new-song-about-ms-dhu-death-in-custody/8172040.

References Cases and legislation Criminal Code (WA). Criminal Law Amendment (Homicide) Act 2008 (WA). R v Chhay (1994) 72 A Crim R 1. R v R (1981) 28 SASR 321. The State of Western Australia v Gore (WASC, 327 of 2015), Transcript The State of Western Australia v Gore [2016] WASCSR 229. Record into the Death of Ms Julieka Ivanna Dhu (Coroner’s Court of Western Australia, 16 December 2016). Books, articles and reports Allas, Tess, Michelle Bui, Bronwyn Carlson, Pilar Kasat, Hannah McGlade, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2018. “Indigenous femicide and the killing state.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ indigenous-femicide-and-the-killing-state. Australian Human Rights Commission. 2020. Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices): Securing Our Rights, Securing Our Future Report. Australian Law Reform Commission. 2018. Pathways to Justice – An Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Final Report No 133. Ayton, Darshini, Elizabeth Pritchard and Tess Tsindos. 2019. “Acquired brain injury in the context of family violence: A systematic scoping review of incidence, prevalence, and contributing factors.” Trauma, Violence and Abuse 22 (1): 1–15.

124  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant BlakBusiness. 2020. “Dear Woolworth’s Chairman. You lied. Aunty Helen responds.” Petition at Change.org December 4, 2020. https://www.change. org/p/woolworths-keep-grog-out-of-our-communities/u/28165013?cs_tk= Ahqw40PVlA4RAp6DzV8AAXicyyvNyQEABF8BvHoWAgtKf3OEcZcLun EoP_4%3D&utm_campaign=89b1cdf12c4b4fe6b3ecbc1edc2e357d&utm_ content=initial _v0 _ 4 _ 0&utm _ mediu m= email&utm _ sou rce=petition _ update&utm_term=cs Broun, Jodie. 1995. “Epidemic.” In bur-ran-gur ang (court out): Women and the Law, exhibition curated by Annette Pedersen, 43–44. Perth: University of Western Australia. Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2017. “At a lethal intersection: The killing of Ms Dhu.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www. deathscapes.org/case-studies/ms-dhu Chrysanthos, Natassia. 2019. “I haven’t been right since’: Mother of murdered baby makes discrimination complaint.” WA Today, 15 April. Coates, Linda, and Allen Wade. 2007. “Language and violence: Analysis of four discursive operations.” Journal of Family Violence 22: 511–522. Corruption and Crime Commission. 2016. Report on the Response of WA Police to a Particular Incident of Domestic Violence. Corruption and Crime Commission of Western Australia. Douglas, Heather, Hannah McGlade, Stella Tarrant and Julia Tolmie. 2020. “Facts seen and unseen: improving responses by using a social entrapment lens for cases involving abused women (as offenders and victims).” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 32 (4): 488–506. https://doi.org/10.1080/10345329.2020.1829779 Freeman, Toby, Fran Baum, Tamara Mackean, Anna Ziersch, Juanita Sherwood, Tahnia Edwards and John Boffa, John. 2019. “Case study of a decolonising Aboriginal community controlled comprehensive primary health care response to alcohol-related harm.” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 43 (6): 532–537. Hennessey, Annabel. 2019. “A cry for help, then and now.” The West Australian, September 10, 2019. Hill, Jess. 2019. Look What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse. Carlton, VI: Black Books. Huggins, Jackie. 2018. “We are life-givers, leaders and fighters. We’ve overcome the odds by being here.” The Guardian, July 10, 2018. https://www. theguardian.com /commentisfree/2018/jul /10/we-are-life-givers-leadersand-fighters-weve-overcome-the-odds-by-being-here Human Rights Watch. 2020. He’s Never Coming Back: People with Disabilities Dying in Western Australia’s Prisons. Sydney, NSW: Human Rights Watch. Joint Standing Committee on the Corruption and Crime Commission. 2020. If not the CCC …. Then Where? An Examination of the Corruption and Crime Commission’s Oversight of Excessive Use of Force Allegations against Members of the WA Police Force. Perth: The Western Australian Parliament. Kwaymullina, Ambelin. 2005. “Seeing the light: Aboriginal law, learning and sustainable living in country.” Indigenous Law Bulletin 6 (11): 12–15. Langton, Marcia. 1993. “Rum, seduction and death: ‘Aboriginality’ and alcohol.” Oceania 63 (3): 195–206.

Say her name  125 Law Commission. 2004. Partial Defences to Murder, Final Report. London: Law Commission (UK). Law Reform of Commission of Western Australia. 2007. Review of the Law of Homicide, Final Report No 97. Perth: LRCWA. McGlade, Hannah. 2012. Our Greatest Challenge, Aboriginal Children and Human Rights. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. McGlade, Hannah. 2019. “Australia is turning a blind eye to violence against Indigenous women, but we will not stay silent – our lives matter.” ABC News, October 6. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-06/ jody-gore-release-domestic-violence-indigenous-aboriginal-women/11570042 McGlade, Hannah. 2020. “Australia’s Treatment of Indigenous Prisoners.” In Maria Berghs, Tsitsi Chataika, Yahya El-Lahib and Kudakwashe Dube (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Disability Activism. London: Taylor and Francis, 274–288. McGlade, Hannah. 2021. “Report of the Inquest into the Death of Miss Dhu (Perth, 16 December 2016): Judgment.” In Nicole Watson and Heather Douglas (eds.), Indigenous Legal Judgments: Bringing Indigenous Voices into Judicial Decision Making. London and New York: Routledge, 308–303. Menagh, Joanna, Hannah Barry and Tyne Logan. 2020. “No inquest into the murder of baby Charlie Mullaley by Mervyn Bell as judge rejects family’s request,” ABC News, July 23, 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-22/ no-inquest-into-murder-of-baby-charlie-at-hands-of-mervyn-bell/12479558 New Zealand Family Violence Death Review Committee. 2016. Fifth Report: January 2014–December 2015. Wellington: Health Quality and Safety Commission. Perera, Suvendrini. 2021. “Report of the Inquest into the Death of Miss Dhu (Perth, 16 December 2016): Commentary.” In Nicole Watson and Heather Douglas (ed.), Indigenous Legal Judgments: Bringing Indigenous Voices into Judicial Decision Making. Routledge, 297–307. Psychiatric Report. 2016. Prepared for The State of Western Australia v Gore (WASC, 327 of 2015). Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. 1987–1991. Australian Government. Stubbs, Julie, and Julia Tolmie. 1995. “Race, Gender, and the Battered Woman Syndrome: An Australian Case Study.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 8 (1): 122–158. Stubbs, Julie, and Julia Tolmie. 2008. “Battered Women Charged with Homicide: Advancing the interests of Indigenous women.” Australia and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 41 (1): 138–161. Tarrant, Stella. 1996. “The specific triggering incident in provocation: Is the law gender biased?” The University of Western Australia Law Review 26: 47–82. Tarrant, Stella, Julia Tolmie and George Giudice. 2019. Transforming Legal Understandings of Intimate Partner Violence. Sydney: Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety. Victorian Law Reform Commission. 2004. Defences to Homicide. Melbourne: Victorian Government. Wahlquist, Calla. 2020. “Tanya Day’s family ‘devastated’ that no police will face charges for death in custody.” The Guardian 27 August. https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/27/tanya-days-family-devastatedthat-no-police-will-face-charges-for-death-in-custody

126  Hannah McGlade and Stella Tarrant Watson, Irene. 2007. “Aboriginal women’s laws and lives: How might we keep growing the law?” Australian Feminist Law Journal 26: 95–107. Watson, Irene. 2014. Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law: Raw law. London: Taylor and Francis.

6

Close the Inquest Alison Whittaker

Led in silence by Aunty Donna Bartlett, our feet move to the rhythm she set. The quiet is important. If we have heavy soles we tip-toe from a monument to Captain Cook to Newcastle Court House. The metaphor is obvious. If you could give the colony feedback, you’d say ‘more subtle, please’. But the colony is like that and sometimes it is not like that. Before the more subtle flex of the colony will come—in the form of sixty pages delivered by video link to Ms Maher’s mother, Awabakal Aunties, and us—our small silence gets blotted out. A car with its windows down blasts ‘I Love It (I Don’t Care)’ by Charli XCX and Icona Pop, stops nearby at a traffic light. Its occupants smirk. II The smoke is readied near a placard of Ms Maher smiling on a brown lounge in a pink shirt. Like all photos on these placards, it was taken in the course of a life in the same way we’re all photographed by loved ones. So someone in a few years can say ‘Look how beautiful you are!’ or ‘Remember this?’ Not ‘Look how beautiful she was.’ or ‘Remember her.’ Aunty Madeline McGrady tells us about all that. Remarks, at the inquest just gone in March, it was just a mother and a sister in law and her in that court and a couple dozen gunjis saying ‘it wasn’t my fault’ and ‘my sympathies.’ Aunty Donna calls them ‘blue murders.’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-11

128  Alison Whittaker Aunty Tracey Henshaw says ‘negligent manslaughter’ and ‘maybe today.’ The flags get held upside down. Oh, and also, as we’re about to walk on, a gust of wind spreads out the smoke to exactly the width of the crowd and pushes it through us. Ready. III Acting State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan asks Newcastle Court ‘Who is there?’ because she is not. Nor is the media, bar two or three local outlets. There are some cops, one grabs four tissues and jokes ‘I’m a crier.’ He doesn’t, though. Everyone else is in Lidcombe, but Ms Maher’s mother, Debbie Small, is here and so are two screens just showing a chair until someone sits in it. We stand. The Coroner tells some stories about Ms Maher, who was truly tender, smart, compassionate and real, who was taken from a big Wiradjuri family who love and miss her and whose kindness was astonishing, who’d buy coats with her last money for neighbours and strangers. Who loved so many and did so many other good things unobserved by this crude public record and me. The Coroner looks at the camera when she reads and savours these bits, acknowledges the family. Then, she takes a breath and quickens. Looks down to read things like ‘criminal history’ and ‘drug use’ and ‘antibodies’ and ‘benzodiazepines’ and we know this unsubtle and cruel clinical pivot means the Coroner will soon say ‘protocol breached’ and ‘could have been prevented’ and ‘should’ and ‘training’ and ‘apologise for any further distress’. And she does say these things but not ‘racism’ or ‘killed’ and then she says ‘close the inquest’ but it never really will.

Part III

Refugees in the deathscape Crimes of peace

Overview Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

Figure Part III.1 Marziya Mohammedali, Call Them Home 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michelle Bui.

Coming into view from a distance, Marziya Mohammedali’s haunting installation, Call Them Home, is instantly unsettling. A small fishing boat appears, out of its element, suspended from the ceiling, its nets ripped and broken. Instead of a title on its prow, along its sides is a whole litany of names, carefully painted and evenly spaced, resembling a wall of remembrance. Below what would be the waterline, however, any semblance of order disappears. In thick, increasingly frantic and crowded letters, a single word is scrawled over and over again: unknown, unknown, unknown. Here are the anonymous, uncounted and unknowable dead, the mass casualties of DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-13

Refugees in the deathscape  131 Australia’s war on those who try to seek refuge by sea. Irrecoverable, uncountable, these are submerged lives and deaths, the unseen underside of the nation, to be dredged from the depths, suspended out of place. We cannot say their names. We may not call them home. The four chapters in this section explore the necropolitical forms of death visited on refugees both at the borders and in the metropolitan centres of Europe and the United States. Crimes of peace, a concept of the social reformers Franca Basaglia Ongaro and Franco Basaglia adapted by Maurizio Albahari in his study of the Mediterranean, materialises the otherwise effaced violence that is both produced and normalised by states through their regimes of border governance. Each of the chapters addresses the deathscapes produced and maintained by a state’s crimes of peace. We open with Albahari’s impassioned mapping of the deathscape faced by refugees in the Mediterranean: the war behind, the sea in front. Drawing from an archive of “antiteleological social history without redemptive conclusions, recorded with intrusions, escapes, hunger strikes, judicial and political action, testimonies, and shipwrecks,” Albahari presents a finegrained analysis. He meticulously itemizes the ever–increasing penalties and punishments adopted by states—crimes of peace that include the “externalization” or offshoring of sovereignty, forms of “administrative detention” and the “hospitality-detention complex.” Yet even as the crimes of peace committed by states proliferate, he argues, the project of state sovereignty is one that can never be fully completed. The state’s crimes of peace are met with a host of stubborn “solidarity practices” across borders—pre- existing trans-Mediterranean networks, maritime traditions and the “necessary intersectionality of any civic struggle.” These counter-sovereignties ensure that despite the states’ increasing attempts at cruelty and dehumanization, “the question and assertion of justice and human equality is never permanently settled: it resurfaces with every shipwreck, and with each person and vessel landing unexpectedly.” In this sense, Albahari invokes the title of the Deathscapes case study on Australian maritime casualties: “Every boat is the first boat.” In Chapters 9 and 10, M.I. Franklin and Jonathan Inda, lead researchers of the Deathscapes UK/EU and US hubs respectively, draw on aspects of their case studies for the Deathscapes site to explore questions of medical “uncare” (Inda) and the “cyberspatial dimensions to border enforcement” (Franklin). In Chapter 9, against the backdrop of the “racialized dimensions to anti-immigration rhetoric undergirding ‘Brexit’ discourses” and the rise of anti-immigration political agendas in all remaining member-states of the European Union,” M.I. Franklin focuses on the “digital, networked dimensions to border-keeping at the gates of ‘Fortress Europe’ and the shores of the post-Brexit U.K.” Franklin argues that while “discussing the digital … tools and procedures that are now commonplace at the points of entry and exit along any national, or regional border may appear far removed from the body count of drowned asylum-seekers,” they play an increasingly critical if “under-theorized role in the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes

132 Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese how refugees and asylum-seekers are received, processed, and their personal data archived and considered by would-be host countries, humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, and courts of law.” In Chapter 10, Inda documents the death of Juan Carlos Baires, a 26-yearold, HIV positive young man in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Despite Baires having informed medical staff of his condition and that he was on antiretroviral medication, the crucial regimen was not continued in custody. Within a week, Baires had contracted an infection and in two more weeks he was dead. His story is painfully similar to others in immigration detention, for example the death of 24-year-old Hamid Khazaei who died of a tetanus infection contracted on Australia’s offshore prison on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Inda discusses the “mismedication” of people held in ICE detention, which includes not just providing the wrong medication or incorrect, insufficient, and inconsistent doses, but also the failure to dispense ordered medications, the use of pain medicine as a substitute for diagnosis or more substantial care, delays in starting medications and providing refills, and the failure to prescribe medications. The extensive practice of mismedication, Inda argues, must be understood as amounting to the “death-making proclivities of detention care,” or a “necropolitics of uncare”: “a lethal politics of not caring about nor caring for.” As discussed in our introduction to this volume, sovereign violence against refugees is enmeshed with historical and ongoing forms of sovereign violence against other racialized subjects—as in Australia, where Aboriginal people became refugees on their own land; or in the United States where histories of the Middle Passage, of fugitive slaves on the run and the separation of children from their enslaved mothers, find their echoes in today’s policies towards refugees and migrants at the border. In Chapter 8, Marina Gržinić calls on an extraordinary range of racialized migrant voices associated with the “Genealogy of Amnesia” Project at the University of Vienna to “uncover … remembrance” with regard to Europe’s buried histories such as the Belgian colonization of the Congo, antisemitism and the Holocaust in Austria, Islamophobia in Spain and the fascist nationalism of the former Yugoslavia. The project poses two questions in the present of the pandemic, characterized by the immobilization of refugees in the “dead territories” of the camps and the “deadening labour” of lockdown: How do these buried pasts “reconfigure the status of Europe today in terms of what is going on with the refugees? And why?”

7

The confined sea and the wavering of sovereignty Maurizio Albahari

Misrata, Libya Habeebi just take the boat. In front of you : Bahr. Behind you : Harb. And the border, closed. Your Sea, Mare, Bahr. Our war, our Harb. Jehan Bseiso, from No Search, No Rescue. With No Search, No Rescue, poet Jehan Bseiso (2015) brings readers to the violent existential and geopolitical interstice navigated by those with war behind them, and the sea as the only way forward. These verses help trace a path of pedagogy and action for potential participants who may translate them into their everyday situation. These are the active citizens who— whether stateless, diasporic or holding one or more passports—are torn by dilemmas but are certain that the death and violation of those who have to cross Mediterranean and other borders is not the ineluctable fate of our times. The trajectory that I propose sketches the sovereign infrastructure of Mediterranean border deathscapes. It then leverages the narrow gaps afforded by such existing realities and by the necessary intersectionality of any civic struggle. Like poet Khaled Mattawa, who dedicates his “Psalm of the Volunteer” to the village of Skala Sikamineas, Lesbos, I am in no position to simply “condemn” (2019, 32–33). I also know that I cannot feign “ignorance.” This journey might be a personal one, but only in the sense of the relational and political “tremendous privilege” (Levi 1989, 158, in Albahari 2016b) of accessing an archive that needs to remain public. The migrant archive is an antiteleological social history without redemptive conclusions, recorded with intrusions, escapes, hunger strikes, judicial and political action, testimonies and shipwrecks. “Every boat is the first boat” (Bui et al. 2020), with its own name, genealogy, blessing and cemetery. Likewise, every passenger, survivor and significant other embodies a distinctive war to leave behind, sea to navigate and border to cross. This migrant archive includes the more than 40,000 people who have died since 1993: At the external borders of the EU, and on its soil while being arrested, detained, or deported (Albahari 2015, 103–105; United for Intercultural Action 2020). DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-14

134  Maurizio Albahari

Figure 7.1 Marziya Mohammedali, Call Them Home, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Michelle Bui.

They left behind the liability to oppression, drought, land and sea grabbing, corruption and war crimes, only to die in the desert, at sea, or behind bars; to be subjected to smugglers’ and militias’ exploitation; and more generally to be subjected to “unlawful death” (Callamard 2017) and other offences of structural injustice, or “crimes of peace” (Albahari 2015, 30). In this ongoing border chronicle, the dead remain trapped in the actively enclosed interstice between the war behind them, and the sea in front of them. To discern the Mediterranean border, writes Angela Naimou (2017, 513), is to look for the bodies it leaves behind, leaves out, or holds captive: they mark the border when they sink to the bottom of the sea along routes made hazardous, or hover near fences made to keep them out, or wait in detention centers that wall them in, or find themselves negotiating the nationalist spaces they are in but not of. The migrant archive declares that the sea is not at fault: The sea does not militarily preclude passage through its straits, including between Tunisia and Sicily, Morocco and Spain, Turkey and Greece, and France and England. It does not dictate global and regional immigration policies featuring utterly (when not artfully) unrealistic labour quotas (Mezzadra and Neilson 2014). It does not make family reunifications nearly impossible. The sea “does not traffic

The confined sea  135 in persons, nor does it rescue them” (Albahari 2016a, 279). The sea does not externalize the pre-emption of migration by imposing exorbitant fines to carriers transporting ticketed but unauthorized travellers (Albahari 2022). The sea does not deny visas, nor transform consulates and embassies into fortresses. The sea does not discriminate between those who are “forced” to reach a safe port and those who “want” to encounter the world and are as such more liable to forced deportation. The sea does not detain survivors. The Mediterranean Sea, then, is a site (perhaps a “more-than-human” entity) of human-made “states of war” that leave in their wake “forensic ecologies of loss, trauma, and obliteration” (Pugliese 2020, 215). Indeed, a plural Mediterranean (Botta and Moushabeck 2014) appears among the casualties of a racialized, toxic and lethal assemblage of “imperialism, settler colonialism, and extractive capitalism” (Pugliese 2020, 31). The Mediterranean’s centrality to this possessive sovereign assemblage and to ongoing crimes of peace also makes it central to any counter-sovereign struggle.

Crimes of peace: a sovereign infrastructure “It’s the wind that wrote my story,” says Benyamin Somay, whom I met several times over recent years in Italy, following his arrival on a rubber dinghy there and his subsequent deportation from Denmark. He fled Iranian Kurdistan as a young man, after the politically motivated arrest of a friend. He was then working as a tourist guide in Copenhagen when national law enforcement and the EU’s “Dublin Regulations” sent him “back” to Italy, to be processed as an asylum seeker (personal interview, April 2016). “It’s the wind that wrote my story” is also the title of the book authored by Benyamin (Somay 2017), in which he details how social support, circumstance and luck helped him breach the sovereign system meant to pre-empt his arrival. Like Benyamin, upon disembarking in the southern Italian port of Gallipoli on an unusually snowy night (December 31, 2014), 800 Syrian refugees demonstrated that they were not passive victims of the commodification of asylum. They did not resign themselves to their Turkish limbo, shaped by the EU member states’ lack of sovereign permission to reach their territory legally, as refugees. However, one cannot even ask for provisional admission or permanent refuge without first paying smugglers. With the transformation of a right into a commodified permission, the price many people end up paying is their own life (Albahari 2018). Having already survived their flight from Syria, and a treacherous Ionian crossing from the Turkish port of Mersin, with the very unexpected presence of their living bodies in Gallipoli these Syrian citizens clarified that they used smugglers to re-appropriate an otherwise hollowed-out right of asylum. Like Benyamin, they do not delve into in victimhood or heroism. More realistically, they present their embodied existence, with all its interdependences, aspirations, delusions. These actors are among the experiential historiographers of crimes of peace. As I explain in the homonymous book (Albahari 2015, 21–24), I borrow the phrase “crimes of peace” from critical psychiatrists and social reformers

136  Maurizio Albahari Franca Basaglia Ongaro and Franco Basaglia. The Basaglias titled an important edited volume of theirs, broadly concerned with the management of people and of poverty through psychiatric confinement, “Crimini di pace” (2013 [1975]). They demonstrate how the very preemption of hypothetical threats associated with behavioural nonconformity generates actual crimes against people, exemplified by the institutions delegated to human cure and care. They place particular emphasis on the technical, administrative and academic mechanisms of institutional violence. In the only direct reference to their title, they write that the concept of crimes of peace offers an analytical key to “all forms of institutionalized violence that serve as strategies of conservation for our social system” (2013, 8). I am indebted to such crucial analytics. I use “crimes of peace” to index the liberal-democratic work of maintaining the current migration-management sovereign “system” in place. This work is administrative, political and ideological. It cherishes “peace,” but patches up its own inadequacy by creatively escalating the violence that it effects. It is ambitious, as it constitutes the material and ideological infrastructure of sovereignty, especially when the latter insists on coupling nation and state. The system of crimes of peace routinely stigmatizes “illegal” immigration, but rarely replaces it with adequately authorized labour migration, refugee resettlement and family reunifications. It liberalizes everything except human mobility. It is a system whose institutionalized and active dimension many observers continue to overlook, but that in fact is not merely an emergency-based response: It is itself a proactive element of humanitarian and democratic disaster. That “every boat is the first boat” also means that each shipwreck and loss of life needs its close analysis (Albahari 2015; Bui et al. 2020). The denunciation of crimes of peace is grounded in empirical investigation, more than in moral indictments. Nevertheless, answers are to be found not only by probing the penal code, the bottom of the sea, or the desert, the elements and physiology. Any crimes of peace investigation pursues also the spatial, temporal, legal, institutional and geopolitical contexts of events, situations, relations, mechanisms of correlation and causality, action and inaction. Reiterated globally and over decades, crimes of peace assume a depoliticized aura of impersonality and ineluctability, clouding the hectically human-made dimension of the sovereign pursuit of the status quo. “But the war is over,” remarked Italian partisan and Shoah survivor Primo Levi to travel companion Mordo Nahum. Nahum’s retort is memorable: “it is always war” (Levi 1989, 189). It continues to be “always war” for some, as the peace of diplomacy and of pacification does not end the inequality and injustice exposing them to exploitation, violence and death. A violently global apartheid of lethal expulsions (Sassen 2014), conditional inclusions, and neoliberal racial ordering (Dawson and Ming Francis 2016) structures human mobility, belonging and the segmented incorporation as labour of racially delineated people. Such a regime arguably scales up the infamous South African experience (Besteman 2019). Elsewhere, I tackle how the

The confined sea  137 drowned, the pushed back and the detained-saved of the Mediterranean are variously conscripted into the military-humanitarian sovereign fabric of EU and national liberal-democracies that are ostensibly at peace (Albahari 2015, 95–116). Here, I highlight that war no longer necessarily “opposes armies to others, or sovereign states to others,” while it continues to produce countless victims and survivors who are “either displaced, confined, or interned in camps” (Mbembe 2020, 35–36). And so-called humanitarian wars, including in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq, are waged precisely in the name of those survivors who are then targeted by the wilful ignorance of their displaced condition and by anti-immigration provisions and racialized Islamophobia. In fact, an ever-fluid number of migration-related barriers mark international borders and the most lethal facet of sovereign deathscapes, including in Bulgaria (with Turkey), Greece (with Turkey), Turkey (with Syria), Pakistan (with Afghanistan), Norway (with Russia), Israel (with Egypt), Tunisia (with Libya), Saudi Arabia (with Iraq), Hungary (with Serbia), the Republic of North Macedonia (with Greece) and the United States (with Mexico). Barriers are complemented by sensors, dogs, X-ray machines, drones, trucks, armed agents, detention centres and deportation flights. Fences, walls and their maritime equivalents—including interception—do have a role in funnelling, redirecting and, more rarely, curbing human mobility. The Greek and Bulgarian construction of fences on the land borders with Turkey—in 2012 and 2013 respectively—convinced Syrian refugees, intent on reaching the European Union from Turkey, that the maritime route across the Aegean Sea was the most viable way forward. More stringent borders may increase the profits of smugglers and promote the symbolic politics of national security. They do augment the material growth of the multinational industries (Akkerman 2018) tasked with building and maintaining them, including via biometric tracking. However, the actual regulation of human mobility happens preeminently through less conspicuous, more intrusive and more preemptive channels, including externalization. International border externalization is rapidly becoming a prerogative of national sovereignty. It comprises the policies, procedures and techniques deployed by polities to expand sovereignty beyond their own geopolitical borders, with the primary objective of regulating or otherwise preempting select immigration, including that of would-be asylum seekers and refugees (Albahari 2022). Externalization entails the expansion of sovereignty’s spatially unbound prerogatives. Quite literally, it nourishes the insatiable sovereign “appetite to take in the horizon” (Perera 2009, 113; original emphasis). Business, geopolitical and colonial agendas overlap unapologetically. Externalizing Italian and EU borders to oil-rich and conflict-ridden Libya (formerly an Italian colony, 1912–1947), for example, continues to involve financing detention centres; training police and coast guard officials, and providing boats, vehicles, cameras and visors; building and implementing radar and electronic systems at its land borders with Chad, Sudan and Niger; and keeping or returning migrants there, knowingly

138  Maurizio Albahari exposing them to degrading detention, forced labour, torture, sexual abuse and racialized killings. In the meantime, lucrative contracts in construction, oil extraction and border technology are facilitated for Italian and multinational companies (Albahari 2015, 77–91). Authoritarian leaders in a variety of other buffer and migrant-origin countries collaborate with their international partners by using emigration as a negotiation chip and are likely to solidify their policing apparatus. The largely unaccountable infusion of cash and of tracking technologies they receive sweetens the demand to prioritize returns and readmissions. EU member states, the European Union, the United States and Australia, among other players, increasingly deploy so-called development aid as conditional aid. The forced immobility of people, and the liberal mobility of sovereignties, corporations and the resources they extract suggest that the trope of “open” or “closed” borders is incomplete (Albahari 2016a). Rather, in their physical, legal, electronic and even temporal dimension, externalized borders are intrusively mobile: They presume to probe would-be travellers’ past biographies and future intentions; they are not equally stringent in both directions and are malleable for different groups of people and things. Sovereignty might ground some of its cultural credibility in its national spatialization; however, its actual workings are more diffuse than what a static border might convey and find a central mechanism in migrants’ captivity. The abstract aspiration to curb ostensibly unwanted migrations materializes in the proliferation of detention. The infrastructure of processing, tracking, detaining and removing is indispensable to the actual pre-emption or otherwise restriction of migrations. For example: One of the ways migration is globally managed is through the seemingly commonsensical claim that there is an inherent difference between provisionally deserving “forced” migrants and by-default unacceptable “voluntary” migrants. In fact, the procedures of captivity and deportation are integral to the policing-humanitarian mechanisms performing such a moral adjudication. While certain sovereign perspectives appear to take for granted a dichotomy between deserving and undeserving migrants, “the entire regime is dedicated to making this distinction,” as Heather Johnson puts it while discussing the Australian situation (Johnson 2014, 108). Migrant captivity contributes to the toll of crimes of peace. This is the case not only in sites of externalization such as Libya, Niger, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Chad, or at the geopolitical borders of liberal democracies, but also in their urban midst (Albahari 2015, 44–59; United for Intercultural Action 2020). Migrant captivity generates self-mutilation, depression, preventable disease, family separations and verbal, psychological and sexual abuse. The contradictions of captivity are likely to emerge with each captive person, including in administrative detention settings, on board of repurposed commercial ferries, in transit zones and territories. Authorities procrastinate by acting relentlessly. When faced with the inherent violence of migrant detention, they intensify surveillance, confinement and individualization. Conforming to the neoliberal rulebook, they outsource

The confined sea  139 management and profits to private entities. Managers and staff desperately create a Chinese-box succession of locks and gates. They punitively cut down outdoor smoke time. They opt for nonflammable mattresses, and bolt beds and cabinets to the floor. They confiscate anything sharp, liberally administer anxiolytics and restrict independent oversight. Theirs is a never-adequate escalation, trailing the irreducible humanity of the people in their charge. “I enjoyed more rights in prison than here,” I have recursively heard in Italian immigration facilities (Albahari 2017). Unsurprisingly, this is a “hospitality-detention complex” (Albahari 2015, 28) that plays with the entanglements of captivity, care and coercion. For crimes of peace happen in everyday wars, for which “armistices are never envisioned”: At sites of the “war of peace” where crimes are perpetuated in the name of the “order of things” and the “protection of man” (Basaglia and Basaglia Ongaro 2013, 80). Readers may ponder Arendt’s bitterly foreshadowing words (1943, 111): “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.” Institutionalized forms of encampment foster the depoliticization of the voices and acts of resistance that they seek to regulate. It is therefore analytically and politically necessary to acknowledge that captive subjects continue to defiantly contest “the dominant structures of the camp” (Johnson 2014, 182). The infamous assemblage of Calais, in one example, is a metonym for both border violence and the cosmopolitan solidarity that characterized life in and around the “Jungle” – a caricature of the Pashtun word djangal, a “bit of forest” (Agier et al. 2019, 2). The area was inhabited and occupied by Kurdish, Afghani, Eritrean, Sudanese, Iraqi and Syrian refugees, among others, as well as by French residents and charity workers, international activists and tourists, local and national politicians, the police, journalists and researchers. Restaurants such as Kabul Café, the White Mountain and the Three Idiots are among the 72 businesses counted in July 2016 (Agier et al. 2019, 84). The neglect of the authorities, the need for a protector and income, and exploitation resulting in prostitution (Agier et al. 2019, 153 n.7), pervasive in this as in other camp situations, cannot be overlooked. Nevertheless, migrants had “invented the hospitable town in France that the government refused them”— and eventually demolished, in October 2016 (Agier et al. 2019, 143). “Siku,” a young woman from Burundi, may engage in casual work outside her Tanzanian refugee camp. Her main aspiration, though, is “to go somewhere that there are not any refugee camps” (in Johnson 2014, 181). Local integration or return are often impracticable for encamped refugees, while international resettlement is most unlikely. What is equally troubling is that crucial policy actors and other observers are likely to dismiss Siku’s aspirations as quixotic and manipulative. Migrants’ concerns are marginalized as largely irrelevant to purportedly realistic diplomacy, international relations and budgeting priorities. Siku’s life is partly shaped remotely, but she cannot request any audience with decision makers. That her aspiration sounds eccentric, albeit being well-founded in her own existence, speaks to

140  Maurizio Albahari the fundamental asymmetry between sovereign decision-makers and the subjects who navigate those decisions. Sovereign actors pursue their exclusionary migration agendas by including into their interventions nearby and overseas non-nationals. What would migration, refugee and humanitarian policies look like, were their main targets also to be involved as coparticipants in design and implementation?

The political sea: critical counter-sovereignties Early on during the Syrian Civil War, internally and regionally displaced Syrian nationals were hoping that European and other consular offices might consider opening their gates to them, at least allowing people to apply for asylum or register for resettlement. If materialized, this would have been a different form of sovereign externalization: The externalization of responsibility (on which I expand below). It remained an unmet expectation, and—given also the Greek and Bulgarian land border closures—many Syrian refugees opted to cross the Aegean. What is the sovereign response to the Syrian children asking their parents why were they travelling on a flimsy boat, rather than flying as in the past? Many of the maritime migrants I have met over the years intended to reunite with family members in Europe, study and work there, and experience the world for themselves. Everyone expressed that if gendered inequities (see Speed 2019; Kasimis 2020), ethno-religious discrimination (targeting Kurds, for example), armed conflict, indefinite conscription (in Eritrea), indefinite encampment, or extremist recruitment (in Afghanistan) are your only certainties, risking life at sea is safer and more dignified than staying on land. This is the case also for the 800 Syrian refugees docking in Gallipoli, Italy, in December 2014. That night, locals experienced a memorable reversal of stereotypical gratefulness. They were struck by the refugees’ “kindness” and by the “courage” of young parents who had to take the lives of their children into their own hands. A municipal police officer shared that it was these refugees’ perseverance that motivated him in staying overnight at the docks. While many refugees repeated “God bless you” and “Thank you,” he thought that he should be the one expressing gratitude: Four-year old “Zahra,” among others, taught him “that a smile is possible even in dire circumstances; even when somebody so young has already seen hell on earth” (in Albahari 2018). Many residents responded with solidarity practices to the nativist sentiments effortlessly shared on social media by other locals. The complicated dynamics of naval distress and rescue, care, voluntarism, charity, solidarity and detention continue to emerge, on a daily basis, at sea, in Sicily, southern Italy and Spain, on the Greek and Maltese islands and in war-torn coastal Libya (Albahari 2015, 2016a, 2019). Contemporary dynamics of solidarity speak to the living legacy of the “law of the sea” (Albahari 2015, 100–103) that has long characterized maritime spaces. The unwritten law of the sea is also codified as the 1974

The confined sea  141 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which oblige all shipmasters to swiftly provide assistance to persons in distress if they are made aware of the need and are in a position to do so. Nevertheless, even the law of the sea is being subjected to the obstacles—heavy fines, bureaucratic delays, confiscations, liability for aiding and abetting unauthorized migration, and standoffs at sea—imposed by the Italian and other governments. Mediterranean maritime circulation continues to be fundamental to the global economy—but, for some, it is also preempted, intercepted, pushed back and taken hostage. Mediterranean maritime circulation continues to enable the asymmetry of the exchange around Mediterranean shores (Albahari 2016a). Such entrenched modality, writes historian Franco Cardini, is rooted in the sixteenth century and allows Europe to “import labour and raw materials … at the prices we establish, and export … finished products and ‘immaterial values’ such as Freedom and Human Rights—this too at the prices we establish” (2015). Market and mobility relations are then asymmetrical relations, but they point to an entrenched historical given, namely, trans-Mediterranean networks (e.g., Abulafia 2011). As in other archipelagic settings (Hau’ofa 1994; Perera 2009), sedentary and settler nationalism pathologizes certain egalitarian relations, including a Mediterranean constant—its diasporic condition. Around these shores, nationalism, colonialism (Clancy-Smith 2014), slavery (Gilroy 1993) and a post-World War II combination of “retaliation and demographic engineering” (Gatrell 2019, 34) had to fight a caustic battle to secure any pretense of linguistic and phenotypic conformity, and of a nexus between soil, flag, blood and religion. Port cities such as Naples, Tunis, Marseille, Tel Aviv and Thessaloniki have long been the object of nationalist and colonial disparagement precisely because of their resistance to linguistic, religious, ethnic and class conformity. This is not to idealize the Mediterranean political space and its past: Its plurality has included mutual accommodations as well as slavery, mass expulsions, forced conversions, genocides, population exchanges, and, since the turn of this century, crimes of peace. What I am noting is that there is no Mediterranean without Mediterranean plural intertwining. Any calculation seeking to sever trans-Mediterranean networks and mutualities is fleeting and hurtful in its application (Abulafia 2011, 414, 572). Today, we confront a European sovereign system that presumes itself pragmatic, but that is in fact desperately utopian. It uses all the techniques at its disposal—digital (Achiume 2020), maritime, terrestrial, satellite and military-humanitarian—to pursue something that no empire or historical era has ever secured: The unsurmountable separation between land and sea (see Perera 2009); Europe and the Mediterranean; Africa, Asia, Europe and their always mobile humanities. Some think that the legal, symbolic and physical partition of people and spaces, including at sea, can actually be accomplished, humanely or otherwise: With militaristic discipline, with a firm diplomatic handshake, with conditional aid, with smart borders. The EU Commission, for example,

142  Maurizio Albahari might conceptualize as “seamless” certain large-scale return border procedures, but “the ‘seams’ in this case seem to be human rights and legal safeguards to uphold them” (PICUM 2020, 2). Truly, “you don’t divide up an empire with a handshake. You have to cut it with a knife” (Saviano 2007, 61). The “White” (for Turkish speakers) Mediterranean Sea is tinted with unrelenting mourning. Its coastal populations are casually asked to become vigilantes of the European periphery—reporting any trespassing, and in charge of captivity. But the “Great Sea” can be confined into a suburban Euro-centred pond only at the ever-escalating price of crimes of peace. More than 40,000 crimes of peace are the collateral damage of liberal democracies’ active pre-emption of select migration, and of their procrastination vis-à-vis their own sovereign mobility regime’s contradictions. In contrast to the utopian pretense of sovereign self-sufficiency, any sailor—migrant or otherwise—will realistically admit that “[t]o be at sea is to be lost, and to be in such a state is to be vulnerable to encounters we do not necessarily control” (Chambers 2008, 27). When people are in distress at sea, international maritime law leaves it to rescuing shipmasters to assess where the closest safe port is. Additionally, maritime spaces are administratively delineated as to facilitate, at least in theory, the allocation of sovereign responsibilities. The International Hamburg 1979 Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) establishes that states have an obligation to ensure effective coordination of rescue operations in designated areas for which they are responsible. The competent office (in Rome, La Valletta, Tripoli and so forth) is to coordinate SAR efforts, irrespective of the flag of the commercial, military, NGO, or private vessels deployed, and of the legal status of the vessel and passengers in distress. Many of those 40,000 lives could have indeed been spared through a more sincere coordination of SAR efforts, and the removal of the artful obstacles to the solidarity of the law of the sea (Albahari 2016). Once again, though, known casualties, survivors and significant others in Europe suggest that refugee resettlement, legal channels for labour migration, and granting family, study and protection visas would have constituted an alternative to maritime journeys in the first place. As in maritime rescues, it is apparent that broader migration, environmental, racialized and global health issues—and the socio-economic differentials that stand behind much migratory patterns—can be addressed only through a multilateral approach. Conversely, it is precisely at such an internationally challenging juncture that the ideology of sovereign selfsufficiency is re-emerging. It is exemplified by the 2018 rejection of the appeasing, non-binding, inter-governmentally negotiated, and UN-brokered Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration by a number of national governments, including the United States, Israel, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (Italy, Romania, Libya, Algeria, Australia and Argentina abstained). Even so, the Global Compact and SAR examples, with all their limitations, convey that the archive of sovereignty is never permanently settled: There is an enduring tension in sovereign calculations, ideologies and practices. This is the tension between sovereignty as national

The confined sea  143 possession and international extraction, and sovereignty as publicly shared responsibility toward people and ecologies. In my understanding, the “shifting relations” that make one facet of sovereignty dominant over other facets are not historically predetermined (Foucault 2003, 109); structural and contingent relations of power are situationally shifting. Such an antiteleological reading implies that the redress of global asymmetries, and the related democratization of human mobility, are neither going to happen by themselves, nor are they going to be handed down. As a critical (Barker 2017) counter-sovereignty (Honig 2013), sovereignty as responsibility and solidarity is not an ultimate goal, but a method, a pedagogy, a process and an intersectional power struggle. Settler sovereignty as possession, displacement and extraction clearly continues to be a prerogative of nationalism, supremacism, colonialism and racialized capitalism, and, in both its nativist blunt modulations and liberaldemocratic attunements, is at the core of the system of crimes of peace. Sovereignty as responsibility also demands steady political scrutiny. It is not exempt from the cunnings of national recognition (Povinelli 2002) and of Eurocentric legitimation (TallBear 2013; Sturm 2017). Its “sustainability” applications might be co-opted by nativist concerns (Perera 2010). It may lend itself to expansive “humanitarian wars,” and to donors’ mitigation of protracted refugee situations “provided that refugees don’t go further than the developing world” (in Albahari 2015, 195). Sovereignty as responsibility and international solidarity may be invoked in border externalization. At the same time, a civic pedagogy centred on critical counter-sovereignties of solidarity and responsibility is already providing a focal framework toward more realistic, participatory and democratized migration policies and practices. Critical counter-sovereignties of solidarity and responsibility characterize a revamped politics of non-anthropocentric commons and ecological stewardship (e.g., Wall 2014); the grassroots demand for refugee resettlement and the reinstatement of the right to seek asylum; the crowdfunded network of non-sovereign Mediterranean SAR operations (e.g., ResQ 2020); and the rigorous examination represented by Deathscapes, PICUM (2020), EuroMed Rights (2020), and countless other transnational actors. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, for example, convened its 45th Session (2017– 2020) on the “Violations with Impunity of the Human Rights of Migrant and Refugee Peoples” in response to more than 500 organizations’ requests. Critical counter-sovereignties of solidarity and responsibility seek to redress neoliberal and other forms of moralizing de-politicization. The principle of responsibility, in particular, does not imply a conformist moral self-reformation (Dawson and Ming Francis 2016). Similarly, the analytics and investigations of crimes of peace are not meant to allocate individual guilt and blame, even as they convey the legal and political responsibilities perpetuating specific structural injustices (Albahari 2015, 22). The “liability model that seeks causality to connect an agent to a harm in order to assign the agent responsibility for it” (Young 2003, 7) is complemented by a more nuanced understanding of agency, embodied intertwining (Merleau-Ponty

144  Maurizio Albahari 1968), vulnerability, and “collective responsibility” (Butler 2003, 31). This is a kind of political responsibility that “implicates persons in the effects of structural processes because they participate in the production and reproduction of those structures” (Young 2003, 10). Crimes of peace are not about despicable war criminals to be selfservingly excommunicated from liberal democracies. Despite their illiberal origins and undemocratic practices, liberal democracies perpetuate crimes of peace in the name of their respective polities and in their midst. The analytics of crimes of peace and of critical counter-sovereignties of solidarity and responsibility foster then an indispensable re-politicization of the “tight imbrication of capital, digital technologies, nature, and war” (Mbembe 2019, 15). Such a toxic imbrication underpins the ideology of the twenty-first century as an inevitable deathscape. The resistant, countering practice of “the political” invoked here is decisive: [T]he community of humans has no ground (or immutable basis) not subject to debate. The community is political insofar as, cognizant of the contingency of its foundations and their latent violence, it is continually disposed to put its origins at stake. It is democratic insofar as, having guaranteed the permanent opening onto the sea, the life of the state acquires a public character; its powers are placed under citizens’ control; and these citizens are free to seek and assert, constantly and whenever necessary, the truth, reason, justice, and the common good. The notions of equality, the state of right, and publicness had hitherto stood opposed to the ideal of force, to states of fact (political arbitrariness), and to the state for secrecy (Mbembe 2019, 15). A permanent opening onto the sea rethreads the politically conflictual dynamics of interdependence and contingency that realistically draw polities’ boundaries and aspirations. Such a democratic opening stands in clear opposition to the routinized execution of crimes of peace in the name of fleetingly settled communities and of the conservation of a weal that is only ostensibly common and public. Settler colonialism and imperialism provide irrefutable examples of how administrative, extractive and racializing sovereignty expands massively to include overseas territories and populations. Decolonization and contemporary forms of migration, then, “largely reverse[d] the direction of movement associated with the growth and consolidation of European empires” (Achiume 2017; Gatrell 2019, 107). However, the exact criteria granting access (or not) to the territory of liberal democracies, and affording inclusion into their polities, remain to be explicitly discussed. For the equal humanness and dignity of all humans continues to be contested, explicitly by supremacism, and implicitly by a sovereign liberal-democratic mobility regime that appears unable to function without executing crimes of peace. How are liberty and human equality compatible with the systematically unequal

The confined sea  145 and illiberal allocation of mobility rights based on ascribed membership in particular territorial, racialized, gendered, national, socio-economic, professional, or religious groups? Is the quest for making international borders inviolable to some groups also the quest for keeping as equally inviolable global differentials of capital, violence and risk, both within and among polities? Readers—stateless, diasporic, or holding one or more passports— might have already found their own existential and scholarly answers. Still, the question and assertion of justice and human equality is never permanently settled: It resurfaces with every shipwreck, and with each person and vessel landing unexpectedly.

References Abulafia, David. 2011. The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press. Achiume, E. Tendayi. 2017. “Re-Imagining International Law for Global Migration: Migration as Decolonization?” American Journal of International Law Unbound 111: 142–146. ———. 2020. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.” November 20. New York: United Nations General Assembly. Agier, Michel, Yasmine Bouagga, Maël Galisson, Cyrille Hanappe, Mathilde Pette, and Philippe Wannesson. 2019. The Jungle: Calais’s Camps and Migrants. Trans. by David Fernbach. Medford, MA: Polity Press. Akkerman, Mark. 2018. Expanding the Fortress: The Policies, the Profiteers and the People Shaped by EU’s Border Externalisation Programme. Amsterdam, Transnational Institute and Stop Wapenhandel. Albahari, Maurizio. 2015. Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2016a. “After the Shipwreck: Mourning and Citizenship in the Mediterranean, Our Sea.” In Social Research: An International Quarterly 83(2): 275–294. Special issue, “Borders and The Politics of Mourning,” edited by Alexandra Delano and Benjamin Nienass. ———. 2016b. “Mediterranean Carnage: Heretical Scholarship and Public Citizenship in an Age of Eloquence.” Anthropological Quarterly 89(3): 865–894. ———. 2017. “Hollow Captivity: Pushing against the Wall.” Correspondences, Cultural Anthropology website, April 3. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ hollow-captivity-pushing-against-the-wall ———. 2018. “From Right to Permission: Asylum, Mediterranean Migrations, and Europe’s War on Smuggling.” Journal on Migration and Human Security 6(2): 121–130. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2331502418767088 ———. 2019. “’We Haven’t Risked Our Life for Food and Shelter:’ Mediterranean Migrations, Contentious Charity, and Justice.” In Governing Gifts: Faith, Charity, and the Security State, edited by Erica Caple James, 99–119. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press and School for Advanced Research Press. ———. 2022. “The Externalization of Borders.” In The Cambridge History of Global Migrations, Volume II, edited by Marcelo Borges and Madeline Y. Hsu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

146  Maurizio Albahari Arendt, Hannah. 1943. “We Refugees.” Menorah Journal 31(1): 69–77. Barker, Joanne, ed. 2017. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. London: Duke University Press. Basaglia, Franco and Franca Basaglia Ongaro. 2013 [1975]. “Crimini di Pace.” In Crimini di Pace: Ricerche sugli intellettuali e sui tecnici come addetti all’oppressione, edited by Franco Basaglia and Franca Basaglia Ongaro, 11–106. Milan: Baldini e Castoldi. Besteman, Catherine. 2019. “Militarized Global Apartheid.” Current Anthropology 60(19): 26–38. Botta, Anna and Michael Moushabeck, eds. 2014. Mediterraneans. Special Issue, The Massachusetts Review, 55(4): 527–728. Bseiso Jehan. 2015. “No Search, No Rescue.” The Electronic Intifada, 24 April. https://electronicintifada.net/content/poem-no-search-no-rescue/14461 Bui, Michelle, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2020. “Every Boat Is the First Boat.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States, https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ every-boat-is-the-first-boat Butler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4(1): 9–37. Callamard, Agnes. 2017. “Unlawful Death of Refugees and Migrants: Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on Extra-judicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.” August 15. New York: United Nations General Assembly. Cardini, Franco. 2015. “Islam: A Threat to Europe? A Reply from Franco Cardini.” Eutopia: Ideas for Europe Magazine, January 22. Chambers, Ian. 2008. Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of Interrupted Modernity. London: Duke University Press. Clancy-Smith, Julia A. 2011. Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dawson, Michael C. and Megan Ming Francis. 2016. “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order.” Public Culture 28 (1(78)): 23–62. EuroMed Rights. 2020. “New Pact, Wrong Impact: How the EU Migration Pact Disadvantages Both Italy and Asylum Seekers.” Brussels: EuroMed Rights. Foucault, Michel. 2003 [1997]. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Gatrell, Peter. 2019. The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent. New York: Basic Books. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands.” The Contemporary Pacific 6(1): 147–161. Honig, Bonnie. 2013. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Heather L. 2014. Borders, Asylum and Global Non-Citizenship: The Other Side of the Fence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kasimis, Demetra. 2020. “Medea the Refugee.” The Review of Politics 82(3): 393–415. Levi, Primo. 1989. Se questo e’ un uomo. La tregua. Torino: Einaudi. Mattawa, Khaled. 2019. Mare Nostrum: Poems. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books.

The confined sea  147 Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson. 2014. Confini e frontiere: La moltiplicazione del lavoro nel mondo globale. Bologna: il Mulino. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Trans. by Steven Corcoran. London: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968 [1964]. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Naimou, Angela. 2017. Preface to “Dossier on Contemporary Refugee Timespaces.” Humanity, 8(3): 511–517. Perera, Suvendrini. 2009. Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2010. “From Sovereignty to Sustainability: The Loops and Lineaments of Exclusion.” In Enter at Own Risk: Australia’s Population Questions for the 21st Century, edited by Suvendrini Perera, Graham Seal, and Sue Summers, 1–28. Perth, WA: Black Swan Press. Permanent People’s Tribunal. 2020. “45th Session on the Violation of Human Rights of Migrants and Refugee People.” http://permanentpeoplestribunal. org/45-session-on-the-violation-of-human-rights-of-migrants-and-refugeepeople-2017-2018/?lang=en PICUM (Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants). 2020. “More Detention, Fewer Safeguards: How the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum Creates New Loopholes to Ignore Human Rights Obligations.” Brussels: PICUM. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. London: Duke University Press. Pugliese, Joseph. 2020. Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence. London: Duke University Press. ResQ. 2020. “ResQ: People Saving People.” https://resq.it/en/home-english/ Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Saviano, Roberto. 2007. Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. Trans. Virginia Jewiss. New York: Picador. Somay, Benyamin. 2017. Il Vento ha Scritto la Mia Storia. Molfetta, Italy: Edizioni la meridiana. Speed, Shannon. 2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sturm, Circe. 2017. “Reflections on the Anthropology of Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism: Lessons from Native North America.” Cultural Anthropology 32(3): 340–348. TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. United for Intercultural Action. 2020. “List of Deaths.” http://www. unitedagainstracism.org/campaigns/refugee-campaign/working-with-thelist-of-deaths/#what_is_death_list Wall, Derek. 2014. The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Young, Iris Marion. 2003. Political Responsibility and Structural Injustice. Lawrence: Dept. of Philosophy, University of Kansas.

8

Racialized violence in Europe The Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees? Marina Gržinić

This topic is, for me, marked by a long trajectory of research and failures. I started my most intensive engagement with racialized violence in Europe in 2012 with the massive pro-refuge movement that arose in Vienna and Austria and came to be a segment in a big mobilization of refugees (see Gržinić 2013). This long march for rights in Europe has now come to a brutal end. In 2021, the disastrous refugees’ camps conditions in Europe are only sporadically appearing as a topic amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. On the one hand, what we have in this present moment in Europe, also under the death toll of Covid-19, is a non-topic in mainstream media that forms the landscape of Europe, on the refugees’ crisis in Europe. On the other hand, a quick flight over the academic or specialized fields’ research materials inside the humanities reveals incredibly abundant commentary. These are needed and important; their abundance testifies to a global neoliberal world of capitalism that is digitally so connected it allows for a constant production of analysis by those connected to the topic. Their analyses are fuelled by an escalation of notions and entanglements that form new landscapes of ever more detailed insights and warnings. Nora Stel (2020) is clear that Europe’s dominant rationale in dealing with the mobility it considers undesirable is the outsourcing of ‘migration management’ to countries in the Global South. Supporting ‘regional’ hosting of displaced people has been the EU’s main answer to the Syrian refugee crisis. She concludes in the text that is a personal tribute to her book, that “Europe is not interested whatsoever to know what is the status of the life and death of those outsourced” outside the European Union. Just these two points present not only a scary diagnosis of the EU hypocrisy, but also a total abandonment of millions of people whose plight is all the effect of past colonialism and neocolonial policies. In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, the fate of African migrants on “the Black Mediterranean” (2016, 58) is a prolongation of “the semiotics of the slave ship” (21). The union of slavery and contemporary “forced movements of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-15

Racialized violence in Europe  149 migrant and the refugee” (21) also come together under the mark of the Occident and its nation-states. What is at the basis of the present mass death of refuges in the context of the Europe and the Mediterranean Sea are the proxy wars and exploitation that Sharpe names “the crisis of capital” (59). In a word—and even more to the point in reference to Naomi Paik’s (2016) Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II—all our protests against what is imposed on the refugees, the demand by the enlightened public that all should be done following the rule of law, is a hoax. Paik is stating clearly in 2016 what was correspondingly exposed by Derek Gregory (2009) in “Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison”: That all that is devised week after weeks, month after month, years after year “to solve” the refugee problem is “done through the continuous and dynamic use of the law” (Nisa 2017). That is a pure cynicism. The European Union is a violently murderous structure of power-borderdrones technologies that functions with an incessant racial logic. In the first part of this chapter, concurring with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s statement in her “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” that “researchers spend too much time either proving trivial things or beating back hostile critiques, and activists devote immense resources to fighting scandals rather than sources” (Gilmore 2017, 231), I instead display Europe’s racializing political concepts, their historical and present topographies, by citing at length the voices of a number of researchers associated with the “Genealogy of Amnesia” project. In the second part of the chapter, I will return to Gilmore’s text in detail, as I am interested to present the overlapping of two forms of racialization and control: On the one hand, refugees’ immobilization, their forced inactivity, being sequestered in camps in Europe, and, on the other, the intensified, loosened or postponed lockdown of “Europeans” due to Covid-19 in 2020.

How is it that we in Europe are accepting fully racialized deathscapes? To understand this question, that is not at all rhetorical, it is necessary to deeply dive into the hyper-racialized histories of Europe. From 2018 to 2020, I led a group of researchers of the arts-research project “Genealogy of Amnesia” (see Academy of Fine Arts Vienna n.d.).1 An important part of our project consisted of building an online archive “Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia,” for which we conducted 70 interviews. “Genealogy of Amnesia” is actually a kind of a historical review, i.e., a genealogy that goes into the history of the meaning and the function of amnesia, which in individual terms refers to forgetting; however, the project aims at uncovering remembrance. Amnesia can also be a social process, and within this research, we connected three different genocides in three territories: Belgium, Austria and the former-Yugoslavia, which now consists of many states,

150  Marina Gržinić but we focus primarily on the wars of the 1990s in the Balkans and their legacy. Our research is focused on: Rethinking the genocidal politics of Belgium in relation to its colonial past in the Congo, which was a scandalous model of colonialism; antisemitism in Austria during the World War II, the Holocaust and related events in Europe; and third, on turbo-fascism, which is a specific, highly invigorated nationalism in former-Yugoslavia active from the 1990s until today. Our question with regard to these three territories and the related phenomena is: How do they reconfigure the status of Europe today in terms of what is going on with the refugees? And why? As we know, the regulation of migration is “among the most consistently racialized practices of most contemporary states” (Bhattacharyya 2018, 129). The refugee situation in Europe is the tip of a massive process of racialization that is both systematic and ongoing. One of the most disgusting cases in point is Belgium’s bloody colonialism and its present realities. Laura Nsengiyumva2 (2018) stated in a workshop organized by the research group that a very recent study conducted by the Foundation Roi Badouin … explains that, actually, the communities of people who originally come from the ex-colonies, namely Belgian Congolese, Belgian Rwandan and Belgian Burundi communities, represent the most educated population in Belgium, but with a four times higher unemployment rate than the rest of Belgium. So, those are some tangible proofs that the discrimination exists. She continues, The context is Leopold II. Here, among us here, we are preaching to the choir, we can all, more or less, say that we know what our reality is. Nevertheless, we live in a society which doesn’t always notice where the problem lies. And still there are publications, articles which are pretty pro-Leopold II, we don’t realize it, but, really, there are municipalities etc., which still do homage to Leopold II, and his statues are still adorned with flowers. And I talked to a friend about it—we don’t know who adorns these statues. There is also the fact that we find ourselves in an urban fabric where he really left his mark, and all this architectural heritage that surrounds us, which we enjoy… and it is also a bit like this: their silence is bought, there is this myth of ‘the Builder King,’ and the people of Brussels simply don’t allow themselves to be critical since they love these buildings, they are attached to them. (Nsengiyumva 2018) Therefore, it is imperative to stress as Tjaša Kancler3 put it, “the historical and the present causes and effects of racism, islamophobia, antisemitism”

Racialized violence in Europe  151 (Kancler in Falconí Trávez 2019). Kancler is very clear on these relations that are palpably materialized on every layer of the Spanish state. This was as well argued in their conversation with Diego Falconí Trávez4 (2019). Falconí Trávez explains that: The European project was always [both a] whitening and coloring project, and, in fact, Spain always had an ambiguous place in Europe for that reason. It was said, there was that phrase until not long ago that Europe ended at the Pyrenees, because there was precisely that fear of the non-civilized ‘other’ which Spain and Portugal represented, [that Edward W.] Said has analyzed so well in his book Orientalism; that is, the ‘other’ that is not white, that is placed in this fiction of whiteness; and it seems to me that everything that we are living now is actually a recycling of previous discourses that have been previously implemented. That racially constituted Eurocentric discourse which created many ‘others,’ must also be contextualized in the rest of the world. The NATO is a whole articulation of that from the North, using its imperial logics, obliges, for example, to have global policies against terrorism, that serve to stigmatize, not only ‘terrorists,’ but whole populations, which serves precisely as an update of an idea that has been around long time between Europe and the ‘Orientals.’ Islamophobia is a racist conception; [it] goes back to the idea of a Spain free of Moorish people. Also, the expulsion of the Sephardi Jews occurs in 1492, the year in which Columbus arrives to Abya Yala. 5 (Falconí Trávez 2019) Jenny Stümer (2018, 20) in her research article, “The Dead are Coming: Border Politics and Necropower in Europe,” affirms that necropolitics remains hidden on one side by the “necrogeography of the borderscape,” while on the other side of the colonial divide, are the territories of refugee camps. At that point what we have is not only a bare life but a bare death that “as a form of nonrelational death [has been] enabled by the constructed otherness of the Muslim refugee” (20). Bernhard Weidinger6 explains: This anti-Muslim racism has proved to be very effective because it resonates very well with the masses, and it is different from antisemitism. You cannot attract mass support in Austria today running on an explicitly antisemitic platform. You can attract mass support running on an explicitly anti-Muslim platform. And, I think there are many reasons for that. One would be, of course, the threat of Islamic terrorism, but there are also factors that date back much further, ranging into colonial times. On the one hand, [this relates] to the collective memory in regard to some conflicts, like the siege of Vienna, but also the tradition of anti-Orientalism. The stereotypes of Muslim men and Muslim women

152  Marina Gržinić that were coined in colonial times are now revitalized, if you look, for example, at the stereotypes of Muslim man as an oversexualized figure. [There is also] the ethnicization of sexual violence, for example, where the far-right nowadays is supposedly tackling this problem by ethnicizing it, by presenting it as if sexual violence, just like antisemitism, nowadays in Austria only exists among migrant populations and particularly Muslim migrant communities. And this, of course, serves another purpose. On the one hand, it perpetuates a narrative of exclusion of Muslims and, on the other hand, it serves to basically absolve the local population of patriarchal heritage. (Weidinger 2019) In Austria minorities and ethnic groups talk about overt racism and try to change and ask for certain different positions. Lukas Egger7 (2019) explains that in present-day Austria, We can see a lot of the motives from hundreds of years ago now popping up again, especially when it comes to Turkish migrants, you have this old idea of Austria defending itself against the invading Turks, this is a motif you can find everywhere, especially in the discourse of the FPÖ8 and you can also see some articles of this anti-Slavic racism; but this was pretty much superseded by the incoming of anti-Muslim motives, pretty much. I do not think you can actually say that anti-Muslim racism, that became the main racist outlook during the last, I would say, a decade, became, like, a reinstatement of older racist ideas. I think this is actually a new phenomenon, especially for Austria. I think it more … reacted to the whole war on terror; to this whole idea about ‘the clash of civilizations.’ This was pretty much non-existent in the 1990s in Austria, or only in very small circles, and it really became a huge, huge centre of the debate in the 2000s. Egger (2019) continues that islamophobia Was taken up so easily because it kind of matched with the whole refugee situation that became more and more prominent and it also has to do with antisemitism, as well. Especially and also with the narrative of the Austrian society as a whole that for the first time, it was possible for the right, not just to deny that they are antisemites, they actually could talk about antisemitism but by externalizing it onto Muslims. So, for the first time, the right could say it wanted to talk about antisemitism, but in the sense that they positioned themselves as critics of antisemitism, because are the only ones who are actually criticizing the ‘Islamic masses who are invading Europe’ and bringing back this antisemitism that, in their eyes, long ago vanished from Austria.

Racialized violence in Europe  153 Paradoxically at first sight, but utterly consistent in historical terms, we see here a project of inverted racialization where antisemitism is externalized onto the Muslims. When we talk of racialized violence in Europe the three nodal points of a history and present of exterminations— antisemitism, islamophobia and the Holocaust—have to be put forward. Being asked on this connection, entanglement of antisemitism, islamophobia and the Holocaust, Eva Kovács9 exposes the relations and changes: Almost all of the big surveys show that antisemitism is rising in the whole world. My opinion is that they [antisemitism, islamophobia and the holocaust] run together because they cannot live alone. It is so because they symbolize a kind of ‘re-ethnicization’ of the world. So, after hundred years of building a kind of nation-states with citizenships and democratic political structures, which impacted after World War II in a really big scope the consensus in Western Europe, after 1989 everybody in Eastern Europe also wanted to have a democratic regime and democratic society in which ethnicity cannot play a fundamental role. Citizenship is important, political activities are important, civil courage can be important, and so on. And after 30 years we found ourselves in the same framework within which ethnic origin is important, ethnicity is important and societies reproduce themselves [on the basis of this reduction] onto a lower and lower, and smaller form. In Hungary, this is really shocking. (Kovács 2019) Kovács (2019) continues: So, first they cut the Roma population [out of society], which was also a regional cut that meant that eastern Hungary does not play an important role in the Hungarian government development. Then they cut the Jews, which was a problematic issue because in Hungary we have a real Jewish community, but then the Orbán government could have cut [divided] this community within itself. […] Gender issues, Roma, Jews, and migrants, so-called migrants, refugees. All of these groups have a kind of insecure position in society. They can still be Hungarian, but ‘I’ [the ones in power] will declare who is Hungarian and who is not. So, I do not think that in Hungary Islamophobia has a long history or that it has a very fundamental tradition. […] You can get this ‘stamp’ of [being] Roma if you are poor. It can happen that you are not a Roma, but you find yourself in a Roma position. The police and your neighbors will recognize you as a Roma. You are white; you are ‘Hungarian’ and not Roma, but suddenly you find yourself in this social position because you are poor. If you are poor, you are Roma.

154  Marina Gržinić Daniel Boffey (2020) in his report, “Policing of European Covid-19 lockdowns shows racial bias,” shows that The ‘disinfecting’ of Roma communities by low-flying planes and the high number of fines handed to minority groups has been cited… as evidence of the racial bias in the policing of the coronavirus lockdowns in Europe. The report by Amnesty International, examining the enforcement of physical distancing measures in 12 European countries, concludes that the pandemic has led to greater ‘marginalization, stigmatization and violence’, echoing the long-standing concerns aired by the Black Lives Matter movement. Moreover, it shows that the very necessary critique of some of the EU new states manifests the processes that are constant but made less visible in the former Western European territories that are all colonial states. A very important analysis is proposed as well by Helios F. Garcés (2016), who conducted research on the colonial history of the Roma people in the Spanish state. In his text “El racismo antirom/antigitano y la opción decolonial” (Anti-Roma/Gypsie Racism and the Decolonial Option), Garcés identifies anti-Roma racism “within the framework of genocide/epistemicide upon which modernity is been built from a decolonial approach” (2016, 225). He brilliantly presents the history and present life of the Roma people as a long-standing racialized community since the emergence of the first modern nation-state, the Spanish empire. Garcés magisterially and painfully proves the line of thought we exposed at the very beginning of this text referring to Derek Gregory (2009) and Naomi Paik (2016) who exposed in their writings that racialization is going on not against the law, but through the continuous and dynamic use of the law. Garcés exposes what Francisco Fernández Buey wrote in this regard: It is therefore possible that a review of modern thought around the important clash between cultures that occurred after 1492 has something to teach the moral and political philosophy of postmodernism that is torn between the self-criticism of Eurocentrism and the consideration of cultural racism as an ideology functional to late capitalism. (quoted in Garcés 2016, 231; trans. Gržinić) But Garces contends, despite the teacher’s words of Fernández Buey, what is produced after 1492 is not a ‘clash of cultures,’ but the creation of a radical hierarchy of one (the European) over the others. So in itself, racism is far from being an ideology functional to late capitalism, rather, it is a structural dimension of modernity without which the early capitalism is absolutely inexplicable. (Garcés 2016, 231; trans. Gržinić)

Racialized violence in Europe  155 In this process, the colonial enterprise eviscerated the identities of colonized peoples “by the pervasive control exercised over all aspects of their lives and societies” (Saito 2020, 47). The research project “Genealogy of Amnesia” wants to shed light on vital issues of contemporary studies on racism. It presents the entanglement of colonial genocides, antisemitism and turbo-fascism. Gerhard Baumgartner10 (2019) argues that “if we take this longer perspective, if you look at the history of camps, it is a colonial practice”: So, before the 1880s, you had no camps in Europe, not whatsoever…. [It] is a colonial practice that was very quickly, around the turn of the centuries, before World War I, imported into European life. And, all of a sudden you have a phenomenon, which [Zygmunt Bauman (1998); added by Gržinić] then called ‘the century of camps.’11 And then camps are everywhere because you have so many relocations of people. During World War I, it was not only about the prisoners of war; when the front moves lots of populations [who] are being taken from one region, because you don’t really trust them, you do not know, the same language is spoken across the border, so you take them and relocate them and it was very, very ugly how the army and the political representatives treat the local population in the non-German speaking areas of the Habsburg Monarchy. So, if you read the book of Rauchensteiner, who was a conservative historian [who] … produced fantastic documentation about Austria in World War I … he asks: ‘how will we ever re-establish something like a normal country if you treat the local populations like this?’ What is significant to comprehend is that in Europe, “before” the refugee crisis, or in parallel to it, enforced racialized processes are already going on, as they are at the core of European occidental whiteness, and today, these are fully embraced by former Eastern Europe. Here it is central to clarify another level that is often set aside, and this is the historical revisionism and the relativization of communism and fascism. Lina Gonan12 exposes that this uncritical denigration of communism leads, of course not in all cases, to the uncritical defence of Yugoslavia, Yugoslavian socialism, as a response, which in my opinion means giving up on something more radical, [on] more radical demands. In other words, historical revisionism [coming] from the right, with this logic ‘communism equals fascism, totalitarianism,’ drives the left into another sort of historical revisionism with the idea that everything leftist that the right attacks must necessarily be defended at all costs. This position makes it impossible to acknowledge the following point, which I think is very important: the continuity of capitalist relations, the state, elites, racism and especially patriarchy, in this context from Yugoslavia to this day. Of

156  Marina Gržinić course, right-wing revisionism is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and this is what the problem is in the first place. (Gonan 2019) The former Eastern Europeans (at times awkwardly) embrace coloniality on the one hand, and on the other side, they emphatically embrace the racialization processes inside their respective nation-states, against Roma, LGBTQ+ people and communities or other marginalized ethnicities inside the majoritarian nation body. These processes existed in socialism too and were simply suppressed and made invisible during socialism in different ways but went viral and blossomed in the time of 1990s post-socialism.

Inactivity, immobilization and refugee camps in the time of Covid-19 To leave and to become a refugee is due to colonialism, imperialism and present proxy wars, but it is also due to extreme environmental events triggered by climate change fuelled by capital hyper-accumulation (Bhattacharyya 2018). In the last decades, European refugee camps began to be more and more parallel with concentration camps rather than humanitarian edifices. However, it is obvious that the parallel is not enough today for providing an accurate analysis. As the camps are turning more and more into prisons, into a carceral system where, as Gilmore (2017, 229) reveals deliberately propagated fatalities, and the forms and patterns that coalesce into premature death, reveal human sacrifice as an organizing principle, or perhaps more precisely as an unprincipled form of organizing, which returns us to racial capitalism and the role of criminalization in it. In 2017, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in her research on the carceral system of capitalism in the US, reactivates the notion of racial capitalism. She states that capitalism [is] never not racial, including in rural England, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, where, as Cedric Robinson teaches us, hierarchies among people whose descendants might all have become white depended for their structure on group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, exploited by elites, as part of all equally exploitable nature-as-other, to justify inequality at the end of the day, and next morning as well. (Gilmore 2017, 225)

Racialized violence in Europe  157

Figure 8.1 Instrumentalised Exposure: In Transit. Screenshot from Deathscapes case study, “Extraterritorial Killings: The Weaponisation of Bodies.”

In an interview “Prisons and Class Warfare,” Gilmore (2019) returns to racial capitalism and clarifies that racial capitalism was already proposed in 1983 by Cedric Robinson in his Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, where he argued that you don’t need Black people to make the system racial. Gilmore (2017, 240) highlights that the “racial in racial capitalism isn’t secondary, nor did it originate in color or intercontinental conflict, but rather always group-differentiation to premature death. Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it.” Gargi Bhattacharyya in her Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival explains that “racial capitalism helps us to understand […] the processes that appear to grant differential privileges to workers and almost workers and nonworkers and the social relations that flow from these differentiations” (2018, x). For Gilmore (2017), racial capitalism is the foundation of massive carceral system in the US. It is the apparatus through which brutal racial power is exercised for accumulation of wealth, the condition that favours the extraction of profit. Gilmore argues: Prisons are money. If we know that, just as prisons, the camps are big business, how is the profit made? As Gilmore (2017, 272) notes: “We used to think that in the United States, contemporary mass un-freedom, racially organized, must be a recapitulation of slavery’s money-making scheme.” On the contrary, Gilmore affirms, “Today’s prisons [and I will add camps] are extractive” (272). What does that mean? It means prisons enable money to move because of the enforced inactivity of people locked [I will add immobilized, stuck] in them. […]

158  Marina Gržinić What’s extracted from the extracted is the resource of life—time. If we think about this dynamic through the politics of scale, understanding bodies as places, then criminalization [forcing people to leave, to take refugee, to ask for a protection] transforms individuals into tiny territories primed for extractive activity to unfold—extracting and extracting again time from the territories of selves. (Gilmore 2017, 227) Very similarly, but also in different ways, the refugee camps in 2020 constitute a carceral system that enables racial capitalism to deploy all sorts of mechanisms of management, economies, administration, and logistics. In camps, over-crowded by thousands “in the prime of life” (Gilmore 2017, 227), people are there kept in a pure bare stupor of forced inactivity. If we think of refugee camps’ status in the last period, the way of their organization, and their criminalization, we can recognize precisely these systems of definitive abandonment and hyper-violence as structures that reinforce group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Racial hierarchies shape the national and international division of labour, consigning those constructed as non-white to the most precarious, dirty, dangerous, and least desirable forms of employment (Bhattacharyya 2018). Refugee camps allow money to move due to forced inactivity of people, which are enclosed in them, but the money is not for the refugees. It is for a myriad of World organizations, respective state organizations and NGOs. Rather, to include the refugees in the division of labour, the extraction is coming from a kept inactivity, seclusion, violent immobility of refugees; these modes of inactivity, in order to be exercised, are always in the end criminal forms of power exercised onto the refugees by legal state and international bodies. The slurred locations are growing as racialized people are expelled or, now in this present moment, kept immobilized, inactivated, displaced from European societies to confined spaces that resemble prisons, and kept in maximum poverty.

Dead territories in 2020 Now in 2020, we face a situation of what is seen as a global collapse and a global lockdown, the self-distancing, self-immobilization and retreat at home or in specialized facilities (for the old, disabled people, etc.). The Covid-19 pandemic is resulting in deaths as well as in a specific format of immobilization that is called self-distancing, self-isolation and forced lockdown. As Angela Davis (2020) puts it: This moment is a conjuncture between the Covid-19 crisis and the increasing awareness of the structural nature of racism. Moments like this do arise. They’re totally unpredictable, and we cannot base our organizing on the idea that we can usher in such a moment. What we can do is take advantage of the moment.

Racialized violence in Europe  159 Due to Covid-19 and their seeming identical conditions of immobilization these two groups may seem to some to mirror each other. However, this is not the case: The refugee camps are kept continuously into a form of dead territories with lives that serve for extraction, while the white wage workers are part of hyper-divisive processes regulated by time and new technologies; captured in procedures of hyper mediation, digitalization, control. On one side, we have life that is made dead in the process of being dispossessed of time, and on the other, we have obsolete labour, a dead labour, attached to a life that is in a situation of a greater abandonment. The relation is in between a “deading life”13 and “deading labor.” The latter can still live if it can, while the former has a life that is directly targeted. Here, then, are at least two temporalities inside two differing spaces. One is a space of total immobilization, and the other presents an enormous slicing of time. The former is without time, so to speak, while the latter is in a total state of exception: A turbo hectic time, a fast adjustment through the network and the web. The refugees present a space of extraction of life as a result of their total immobilization, the white wage workers are labour made dead, defunct and obsolete. Specifically, in such a context, digital technology, the internet and the web shape the digital aspects of racial capitalism. For the immiserated white wage workers and the white trash, racial capitalism operates by exercising constant mobilization of desire (Bhattacharyya 2018, ix). Social platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter, can operate as wellsprings for racialized imaginaries. However, we have to be cautious at this point, for while social media can be a wellspring for racist imaginaries, for refugees they have also been a key medium to make their conditions visible, to organize, resist etc. (Perera 2019). Bhattacharyya (2018, x) is right when she exposes the differentiation that is coming from different “sedimented histories of racialized dispossession that shape economic life in our time.” I could even offer a paradoxical genealogy that goes along the line of division between democracy and totalitarianism, a line so dear to neoliberal global capitalism, as the Occident is always on the side of democracy, and “the rest” is on the side of totalitarianism; in democracy the colonial divide is between a deading life (refugees) and a deading labour (a new army of a post-Covid-19 sub-proletariat or “white-trash”). And what is reserved for totalitarianism (if we take China as an example)? China’s brutal crackdown on the Uighur Muslim minority, secluded in Xinjiang internment camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the Government of China, presents coercive labour in mass prison facilities for the re-education of thousands of “dangerous” citizens. That is again a deadly cynicism. Therefore, as argued by Gilmore (2017, 230) referring to Stuart Hall’s argument in the 1970s: If race is the modality through which class is lived, “then mass incarceration presents a class war.” And, to Gilmore’s mass incarceration I would now add: Massive refugee camps and massive numbers of nursing homes and homes of migrants in the ghettoized peripheries of the occidental global world. Briefly to conclude, as what is going on has no end: There is no responsibility by Europe (not even as in the past rhetorically performed); there is

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no responsibility, specifically, by the former Western European states that all obtained their wealth through colonialism, exploitation, dispossession, genocides. The refugees are today fully exposed to intensifying processes of racialization, immobilized in refugee camps, fixed into misery and abjection. Who will change the state of the things?

Notes 1 The core team of “Genealogy of Amnesia” project consists of Marina Gržinić as leading researcher, postdoctoral researchers Sophie Uitz, Jovita Pristovšek, and Šefik Tatlić, doctoral researcher Christina Jauernik, and a professional associate Valerija Zabret. 2 In the notes, I add a biography for each interviewed position that was part of the art research project “Genealogy of Amnesia.” Laura Nsengiyumva is a Belgian-Rwandan artist who lives in Brussels, Belgium. She won the first prize at the Kunstsalon Ghent in 2011, and the second prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2012. Nsengiyumva explores themes such as diasporic experience, multiple identity, North-South relations and empathy. 3 Tjaša Kancler PhD, they are activist, artist, researcher and associate professor at the Department of Visual Arts and Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona. They are a co-founder of t.i.c.t.a.c. – Taller de Intervenciones Críticas Transfeministas Antirracistas Combativas and a co-editor of the journal Desde el margen. Some of their recent publications include the book Arte-Política-Resistencia (Barcelona: t.i.c.t.a.c., 2018) and other articles on global capitalism, borders, zonification, decolonial feminism, trans* imaginaries and struggles. 4 Diego Falconí Trávez PhD is a human rights lawyer and a theory of literature scholar. He is an associate professor in the area of literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, a visiting professor of law at the College of Jurisprudence, San Francisco University of Quito, Ecuador, and a visiting professor at the Simón Bolívar Andean University, Ecuador. 5 Abya Yala, meaning “land in its full maturity,” originates from the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia, and refers to the Americas. 6 Bernhard Weidinger PhD is a researcher on far-right issues at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) in Vienna and affiliated with the Research Group on Ideologies and Politics of Inequality (FIPU). His dissertation on pan-German student fraternities and politics in Austria after 1945 was published at Böhlau in 2015. His research interests include far-right parties and movements in Europe and the US, nationalism, and masculinities. 7 Lukas Egger graduated in political science in Vienna. Currently, he is working on a PhD thesis on racism from a state-theoretical perspective. His research focuses on the history and theories of racism, the state, Marxism, and neo-Marxism. 8 The Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) was founded in 1956 as a Germanic national liberal party with close associations to the Nazis. 9 Prof. Éva Kovács PhD has been a research programme director at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) since October 2012. Her research fields are the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, research on memory and remembrance, and Jewish identity in Hungary and Slovakia. 10 Gerhard Baumgartner PhD has been head of research at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) since May 2014. His research focuses on the resistance and persecution 1938–1945, history of the persecution of Roma and Sinti, Austria’s handling of its Nazi past, and history of national minorities in Burgenland.

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11 Giorgio Agamben (1998) designated the camp as the “‘nomos’ of the modern.” 12 Lina Gonan is a philosopher and art historian employed at the Multimedia Institute in Zagreb. She is an activist in the field of women and LGBT*QI+ rights. Her fields of interest are aesthetics, the philosophy of politics and gender theory. 13 Deading life is a procedure employed to deaden, suppress, reduce, diminish, impoverish, ruin life, but it is not yet death (Stanescu 2013). See also Gržinić (2016).

References Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. n.d. Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (website). Accessed December 14, 2020. https:// archiveofamnesia.akbild.ac.at. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1988. “Das Jahrhundert der Lager?” In Genozid und Moderne, 1: Strukturen kollektiver Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt, 81–99. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Baumgartner, Gerhard. 2019. “Gerhard Baumgartner in Conversation with Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić.” Filmed June 27, 2019, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Video interview, 59:51. https://archiveofamnesia.akbild. ac.at/?videos=gerhard-baumgartner&_sft_people=baumgartner. Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2018. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Boffey, Daniel. 2020. “Policing of European Covid-19 Lockdowns Shows Racial Bias – Report.” The Guardian, June 24, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/24/policing-of-european-covid-19-lockdownsshows-racial-bias-report. Davis, Angela. 2020. “Ava DuVernay Interviews Angela Davis on This Moment—And What Came Before.” Interview by Ava DuVernay. Vanity Fair, August 26, 2020. www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/angela-davis-and-avaduvernay-in-conversation. Egger, Lukas. 2019. “Lukas Egger in Conversation with Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić.” Filmed October 9, 2019, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Video interview, 41:22. https://archiveofamnesia.akbild.ac.at/?videos= lukas-egger&_sft_people=egger. Falconí Trávez, Diego. 2019. “Diego Falconí Trávez in conversation with Tjaša Kancler.” Filmed April 5, 2019, at t.i.c.t.a.c. – Space for Transfeminist Antiracist Critical Interventions, Barcelona, Spain. Video interview, 31:02. https://archiveof amnesia.akbild.ac.at/?videos=diego-falconi-travez&_sft_people=falconi-travez. Garcés, Helios F. 2016. “El racismo antirom/antigitano y la opción decolonial” [AntiRoma/Gypsie Racism and the Decolonial option]. Tabula Rasa, 25: 225–251. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2017. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, 225–240. New York: Verso. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2019. “Prisons and Class Warfare: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore.” Interview by Clément Petitjean. Solidarity, February 21, 2019. https://solidarity-us.org/prisons-and-class-warfare-an-interview-with-ruthwilson-gilmore/. Originally published in French at Période in 2018, in English on the Historical Materialism blog. Gonan, Lina. 2019. “Lina Gonan in Conversation with Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić.” Filmed October 14, 2019, at the Centre for Women’s

162  Marina Gržinić Studies, Zagreb, Croatia. Video interview, 49:58. https://archiveofamnesia.akbild.ac.at/?videos=lina-gonan&_sft_people=gonan. Gregory, Derek. 2009. “Vanishing Points: Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison.” In Terror and the Postcolonial, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, 55–98. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gržinić, Marina. 2013. “A Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna and the European Union’s Processes of Racialization, Seclusion, and Discrimination.” e-flux journal, no. 43. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/43/60214/a-refugee-protest-camp-invienna-and-the-european-union-s-processes-of-racialization-seclusion-anddiscrimination/. Gržinić, Marina. 2016. “‘Afterwards’: Struggling with Bodies in the Dump of History.” In Body between Materiality and Power: Essays in Visual Studies, edited by Nasheli Jiménez del Val, 163–182. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Kovács, Eva. 2019. “Eva Kovács in Conversation with Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić.” Filmed June 26, 2019, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Video interview, 40:35. https://archiveofamnesia.akbild.ac.at/?videos= eva-kovacs&_sft_people=kovacs. Maddrell, Avril, and James D. Sidaway, eds. 2010. Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance. London: Routledge. Nisa, Richard. 2017. “Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II by A. Naomi Paik.” Society & Space, December 12, 2017. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/rightlessness-testimony-and-redressin-u-s-prison-camps-since-world-war-ii-by-a-naomi-paik. Nsengiyumva, Laura. 2018. “Laura Nsengiyumva: Workshop Brussels 2018.” Filmed May 3, 2018, at leSpace, Brussels, Belgium. Video interview, 34:39. https://archiveofamnesia.akbild.ac.at/?videos=laura-nsengiyumva&_sft_ people=laura-nsengiyumva. Paik, A. Naomi. 2016. Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Perera, Suvendrini. 2019. “Lines of Sight.” Social Identities 25 (4): 439–446. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2018.1514149. Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books. Saito, Natsu Taylor. 2020. Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists. New York: New York University Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Stanescu, James. 2013. “Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life.” PhaenEx 8 (2): 135–160. Stel, Nora. 2020. “Governing Refugees through a Politics of Uncertainty: Insights from Lebanon.” Border Criminologies blog, September 27, 2020. https://w w w.law.ox.ac.uk /research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/ centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/09/governing. Stümer, Jenny. 2018. “The Dead Are Coming: Border Politics and Necropower in Europe.” Cultural Politics 14 (1): 20–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-4312856. Weidinger, Bernhard. 2019. “Bernhard Weidinger in Conversation with Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić.” Filmed October 9, 2019, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Video interview, 33:51. https://archiveofamnesia.akbild. ac.at/?videos=bernhard-weidinger&_sft_people=weidinger.

9

Life and death at the digitalized border “Access denied” M. I. Franklin

Along the borderline An ongoing political stalemate around a common policy towards the rights of refugees and immigration in general have shown European and UK governments sadly wanting in their response to the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding on their doorsteps for well over a decade (Guterres 2015; Muižnieks 2017; World Bank 2017). In 2015, arguably a turning point in political and media-driven debates on the status of refugees and asylum-seekers, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) pronounced the overall situation as critical (Møller, in Ridley 2016) whilst the Greek government was struggling to handle not only the thousands arriving on its shores but also the sudden influx of international aid and media attention (Howden and Fortiadis 2017). Divisions run deep in the European Union about the realization of freedom-of-movement rights given member-states’ mutual obligations in honouring this principle, divisions that for many commentators paved the way for the United Kingdom’s official exit from the European Union in 2021. The racialized dimensions to anti-immigration rhetoric undergirding “Brexit” discourses in the 2016 referendum in the United Kingdom are woven though longstanding fissures in British society about cultural identity, citizenship rights and sovereignty (Benhabib 1997; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1996), tensions that resonate with the rise of anti-immigration political agendas in all remaining member-states of the European Union under the terms of the Schengen Agreement; “Europe’s borderlands club” as Howden and Fotiadis put it (2017). Waves of orchestrated and “lone wolf” or “home-grown” terrorist attacks around Europe along with ongoing arrivals of asylum-seekers by land and sea fuel these imaginaries, which bolster national security procedures that toggle between “substantial” to “severe” (the United Kingdom), to quasi-permanent full states of emergency (France), to unilateral push-backs of stranded asylum-seekers, with the accompanying violence, at the eastern (Poland-Belarus) borders of the EU. These national responses underscore continued squabbling in Brussels as to where the buck stops for the EU as a whole under humanitarian and international

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-16

164  M. I. Franklin human rights law. For instance, Article 4 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2016/C 202/02) states, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. Articles 18 and 19 make clear member states’ obligation to respect the rights of refugees under other international conventions, including non-refoulement, i.e., sending people back to places that cannot guarantee their safety. Meanwhile the all too visible, and visceral evidence of both the UK’s and the EU’s lack of political resolve, or ability to live up to their own high human rights standards becomes public record. In all respects these powerful polities have reneged on their obligations under international law (Amit and Landau 2016; Various 2013). Tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes, seeking refuge from war, if not the effects of famine, endemic poverty and climate change, have been dying, or are languishing in rough-shod camps (e.g., on the island of Lesvos, Greece or Calais, France) and detention centres (e.g., Yarl’s Wood in the United Kingdom). These large-scale population movements are not emanating from within Europe, as was the case at the end of the Second World War—events that led to several international conventions on human and refugee rights—or in the 1990s during the civil war in the Balkans. Individuals and family groups are arriving from Syria, other parts of the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa for the most part. EU member-states, as signatories to international treaties and conventions on the rights of refugees, the rights of migrants and concomitant human rights, are their destinations of choice (polities required by law to honour these obligations), as well as of necessity (being the closest in that regard) at the end of a long road. The human suffering taking place in these maritime, air-patrolled and land-based “biopolitical border zones” (Topak 2014, 2017) underscores the deleterious effects on minds and bodies, and communities, of this hardening of immigration and asylum policy around the world, in legislative centres such as Westminster, Strasbourg, Brussels, Canberra, or Washington DC. For asylum-seekers, making it to a country that is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention means passing through any number of gateways, in themselves obstacle courses that are physically, psychologically and legally taxing. As this chapter argues, these obstacles are also increasingly intrusive with respect to civil liberties in general, as they become part of digitized and globally networked designs for patrolling the borders of ‘Europe’. Trans-border cybersecurity agencies can now deploy tools and systems to locate and track the refugee/migrant Other as a digitally verifiable miscreant, violent interloper in ways that continue to escape public scrutiny, legitimate forms of redress, legal or political accountability. Evidence of human rights abuses, in camps and detention centres reveal both the negligence and complicity of (inter-) governmental agencies as members of borderenforcement authorities that are dependent on private, transnational security companies.

Life and death at the digitalized border  165 The digital, networked dimensions to border-keeping at the gates of ‘Fortress Europe’ and the shores of the post-Brexit United Kingdom, is the focus for this contribution, namely the emergence of not only outsourced but also digitally adept and computer networked-based gatekeeping at the inner and outer borderlands of the Schengen Zone. These gatekeepers—human and automated—are charged with enforcing policies of deterrence, search and rescue, and eventual processing and detention of asylum-seekers, if they survive the journey. These actors—private military and security companies— PMSCs (Bures and Carapico 2017), work on behalf of state agencies, under contract; Frontex the EU Border Agency is one of these ‘public-private partnerships’: Serco and G4S are two other examples, companies in which personnel have faced charges in connection with deaths in detention and during deportation (Yacoub and Franklin 2018). The privatization of border control and detention centres plays a central role in national and intergovernmental policies that conflate the plight of refugees with broader political debates about immigration, cultural belonging and citizenship in the increasingly multiracial yet begrudgingly multicultural societies of the European Union and United Kingdom (England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland).1 The tools and programs—land, sea and air—that monitor and corral the movement of incoming populations are dependent on internet-based media and communications systems developed for military, policing and civil uses (Holmes 2007). They are inseparable from micro-level, bio-engineered and macro-level, satellite-linked means for locating, scanning, classifying and patrolling an individual, group, or designated space, e.g. by using GPS and geo-sensing techniques, military drones and other sorts of automated sensing devices to patrol, or target any given surface, or vessel and so render visible and digitally identifiable human bodies as distinct data points, gathered into large data sets. Practices of border control and national security— deterrence, detention and processing—are converging on the domains of everyday policing as law enforcement and intelligence services become increasingly intertwined, in the name of anti-terrorism measures (Balleste 2015; Council of Europe 2014). Several questions, for engaged scholarship and research-led activism alike, go begging through this confluence of visceral and digitalized border pathologies. The first issue is the politics of technological design, namely the formative role that digital, networked technologies play in the acts of violence, neglect, or disingenuousness on the part of national and transnational actors that lead to deaths at any particular point along the “frozen borderline” (Nico 2007) of the Schengen zone, which distinguishes EU jurisdictions (enforced by Frontex for instance) from that which is governed by the UK’s “Border Security” apparatus. Investment in, and the roll out of, punitive surveillance programs dovetail with the melding of commercial and government-sponsored programs premised in the real-time, large-scale tracking, collecting and retention of people’s everyday movements, on the ground and online. The second question going begging is the legitimacy gap

166  M. I. Franklin emanating from the under-regulated ownership and control of the networkedmateriality of these apparatuses underpinning “internet governmentality” as public policy, big business, and statecraft (Franklin 2014, 2015); made manifest through personalized, hand-held devices through which billions of people access the internet and powerbrokers, in turn, monitor our everyday lives online. Third is how to apprehend the virtual, cyberspatialities facilitated by these same devices, transmission pathways, panoply of social media apps and web-based information sources that can support and guide, in turn, those undertaking these journeys. All these can also be repurposed for campaigning, mobilization against inhumane treatment and detention conditions on the ground, and for conducting investigative research for legal action and public awareness (Topak 2014, 2017; Yacoub and Franklin 2019).2 This double-life of digital networks, planetary and interpersonal, lies at the heart of how socially engaged scholars, immigration reform and antiracism advocates and activists seek to call to account world leaders for the upsurge in forcibly displaced persons in the world, 79.4 million at the end of 2019 (UNHCR 2020). Within this longer-term dynamic, policy paralysis around a common EU immigration policy contrasts with burgeoning agreements over border and cyber-security measures between some EU member-states and those bordering the African continent’s shorelines of the Mediterranean. The human cost, judicial and political ramifications of these agreements for the resilience of existing international human rights instruments are still unfolding.

Aims and argument After providing an overview of the statistical and categorical dimensions to these population movements according to UN records, this chapter considers some of the conceptual challenges for politically engaged scholarship on the computer-networked domains of immigration and asylum as these converge on everyday policing. 3 It does so by considering an insight that Stuart Elden (2007) draws out from two of Michel Foucault’s lectures in a series Foucault delivered at the Collège de France. Entitled the “birth of biopolitics” and “security, population, and territory” (2004a, 2004b), these two lectures have often been subsumed under his other, oft-cited, lecture on “governmentality”, the first from this series to be translated into English (Foucault 1978/1991). In these classes, Foucault unpicks the dynamics that contribute to what could be called the “schizoid” pathology informing once ‘modern’ and now contemporary state actors as they ostensibly abide by the “rule of law” (Heller and Pezzani 2014, 2015 Ward and Green 2016). In this way, we can read how Foucault rearticulates—even as he claims to reject—the Freudian psychodynamic critique of rational individualism in these reflections on the (il)logics of liberal governmentality (Foucault 1978/1991; Franklin 2014). Foucault’s published hostility to both Freudian and Marxian schools of thought notwithstanding, in these formulations we

Life and death at the digitalized border  167 can see how he conceptualizes the day-to-day practices of state actors striving to “govern but not too much” (Foucault 1978/1991). Under the aegis of liberal humanitarianism these practices become complicit in the inhumane and effectively deadly forms of “population control” that the case studies in the Deathscapes project reveal as increasingly hysterical cycles of crisismanagement (Foucault 2004a, 2004b; Mbembe 2019; Various 2017). The push-and-pull of what Foucault posits as the centripetal and centrifugal forces of state-sponsored governmentality, as Elden argues (2007), can be brought to bear on projects that map avenues for resistance at the online-offline nexus of xenophobic and increasingly robotized border policing. This situation has reached its apotheosis, at least to date, through the evolving yet never-complete nor perfected armouries of the aforementioned public/privately funded apparatuses of population control, digital, cyberveillance measures (Kulesza and Balleste 2015) that strive to keep the unwanted stranger out and biometrically tagged citizenries in. The latter, centripetal, practices look inwards (to citizens and residents); the former, centrifugal, agendas focus outwards (to prospective citizens/residents). Taken together Foucault’s state-focused critique in this series of lectures offer analytical openings for crafting action-plans that can strategically target state agencies, and their proxies, in order to raise awareness (first) and (second) eventually bring to an end not only those killings that occur during extradition, whether or not they are ruled as “unlawful killings”, but also bear witness to the many certified deaths and also the agonies of ‘near-death’ that many suffer when incarcerated for indefinite periods (Yacoub and Franklin 2019).

Legal-statistical contexts of suffering UN based statistics bear some mention for they provide quantifiers of these categories which underscore a host of political stress-points spanning over 70 years of treaties and covenants that enshrine the norms and legal standards of international human—and refugee—rights (Fidler 2015: 95). In addition, news outlets, international organizations charged with refugee and other humanitarian aid, national governments, the various organs of the European Commission, other treaty organizations such as the Council of Europe, and UN agencies refer to these forced movements of people as refugees and/or asylum-seekers, or “economic migrants” in often conflicting ways. These different terms of reference (Amit and Landau 2016; Braithwaite 2016; Guterres 2015) point to the underlying political implications of such categories. As Michael Møller argues: There should be no misunderstanding between refugees and economic migrants … [yet] … the terms refugee and migrant have been put into the same salad. To put it very bluntly, every refugee is a migrant. Not every migrant is a refugee. (cited in Ridley 2016)

168  M. I. Franklin Labels in all their elasticity, along with the statistics they carry nuance the shifting rhetoric of crisis, threat and security. According to the UN Refugee Agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the end of 2014 signalled a sharp jump in the number of people on the road after being forcibly displaced from their homes; from 52.2 to 59.5 million. In other words, one out of every 122 human beings, at that time, was either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum (UNHCR 2015, 2016), half of which were children. In the following year, due largely to ten major armed conflicts, the number of people forcibly displaced around the world had risen to over 65 million, equivalent to the total UK population (World Bank 2016). For instance, in the one month of October 2015 the number of refugees attempting to enter the European Union by sea (media and governments’ focus on the Italian islands such as Lampedusa shifted to the Greek islands of Kos and Lesvos) was equivalent to the total over the whole of 2014: 53% of which were Syrian. By the start of 2020 this steep upward curve had risen to over 79 million with 68% coming from but five countries, all in the Global South: 26 million of these forcibly displaced persons are recognized as refugees with 4.2 million registered as asylum-seekers (UNHCR 2020). These numbers, once unpacked, highlight the skewed geographies of asylum reception and practical provisions. It is not the wealthier parts of the world that are confronted with the need for immediate and longer-term responses to the arrival of thousands of traumatized, exhausted people. Host states in the Global South carry the heaviest burden, hosting 86% of the world’s refugees; across the Syrian border in Lebanon for instance, one in three or four people was a refugee by 2015, the year that the world’s news media started to pay attention to deaths at sea (Elliot 2016; Franklin and Yacoub 2017; UNHCR 2015, 2020). This skewed geography is reflected in the arrival figures for those taking the sea and land-routes to the borders of the larger European continent, which stretches from Greece and Turkey up into Scandinavia and the Baltic States. The burden of reception, lodging, legal processing and then management of the eventual transit, onwards or backwards, of the thousands reaching these shorelines is being borne by Greece and the southern member-states of the European Union—Italy, Hungary and the Balkan states in particular. Within the richer parts of Western Europe, Germany has accepted the major share of recorded applications for asylum. But it is the death toll, particularly at sea, but also on the foreshores of the southern perimeters of continental Europe that signal the scale of magnitude. At the one end of the human spectrum children are disproportionately represented in these necro-statistics and, at the other, national and inter-governmental conflicts over “economic migrants” further up-stream in intergovernmental negotiations grind on. Mass deaths by drowning, if not by dehydration and exhaustion, are now recorded live, or reconstructed, and uploaded onto dedicated websites, national news and

Life and death at the digitalized border  169 commercial social media outlets. Images of capsized boats, unseaworthy and over-full vessels of all descriptions drifting in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and now in the Channel, bodies washed up on the shore, exhausted and drenched passengers in flimsy, useless life-jackets being pulled on to coastguard boats, or taken on board by fisher-folk and other private vessels defying their own national anti-human trafficking laws, fade in and out of newsfeeds. EU search-and-rescue missions have been renamed “death by rescue” by forensic research into the protocols by which refugee boats may be located yet not intercepted by national coastguards, leaving the real-time rescuing up to boats operated by international NGO organizations (Heller and Pezzani 2014). Within current EU member-states, and in Brussels, debates about whether search and rescue (SAR) undertakings are in themselves encouraging more people to make these journeys still dominate legislative agendas. The vague wording of the 1951 Refugee Convention attempting to mitigate the circumstances leading to these geographies of arrival and processing underscores a lack of clarity on the legal parameters of search and rescue as these run along the maritime borders delineating national from international waters (Den Hertog 2012; Heller and Pezzani 2014, 2015). The jurisdictional complexities, and with that the political tensions on the ground pivot on who bears the responsibility of being the first point of entry for the thousands being washed up on the beaches of southern Europe’s holiday destinations.

Gatekeeping powers at the online-offline nexus Discussing the digital, predominantly though not necessarily networked tools and procedures that are now commonplace at the points of entry and exit along any national, or regional border may appear far removed from the body count of drowned asylum-seekers. These tools and everyday communications devices—the most important ‘non-food item’ that people take with them, may seem contingent upon, rather than determining aspects of, the physical properties of the shorelines, maritime and airspaces that coastguard or land-based border authorities patrol. But in the context of ongoing policies of digitizing the strategic infrastructures of national security and government services, they play an under-theorized role in the cat-and-mouse game that characterizes how refugees and asylum-seekers are received and processed, and their personal data archived and considered by would-be host countries, humanitarian organizations, UN agencies and courts of law (Aarstad 2017; Bosilica 2016; Boulanin 2013; Bowden 2013). An existential challenge to the historical incumbency of states as territorial sovereigns over their own citizenries is unfolding, linked to the rise in economic reach, and hegemonic power of this century’s global corporations; the “Big Tech” that owns and controls the lion’s share of internet goods and services, terms of access and use, data storage and management

170  M. I. Franklin (Durieux 2016; Fraser 2007; Muižnieks 2017; Various 2013). These powerful monopolies (social media service providers, software developers, mobile phone companies and equipment manufacturers) now facilitate the means by which borders are managed, and how people traverse legal and clandestine routes in and out of economic, and national jurisdictions. The global market-share and normative reach that these companies have on everyday life for billions of their ‘netizens’ are beginning to rival the ability of national and local authorities to influence and inform their citizenries and constituencies, respectively.4 In this broader political economic context, not only is the European Union as a whole erecting new physical and virtual—digitalized—walls at existing entry-points on its external borders but its member-states have been deepening, and expanding these frontiers in two ways: (1) beyond conventional national territorial boundaries into others’ jurisdictions by setting up processing/detention centres in places such as Libya (as is the case with Italy), or Turkey (with Germany), and entering into detention centre ‘sharing’ arrangements with African Saharan states (as is the case with the United Kingdom); (2) by the increasingly public-relations dimensions to how off-the-shelf and tailor-made procedures and equipment digitally enhance border controls and immigration, automate identity-checks by government agencies, and their outsourced agents of border and detention- centre surveillance, private companies. It is no longer sufficient for twenty-first century statecraft just to patrol the gates and contingent interiors of landed border zones. The imperative is to push these outwards as well as drill down, deeper into the individual body, familial and community spaces that comprise both citizenries and undocumented, precarious populations awaiting the outcome of lengthy application procedures. The computational power and data-retention capacities are designed to record and sift through the vast databases that ensue, increasingly by automated processes premised on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Commercial and governmental forms of digitized identification, infrared and other forms of enhanced visioning technologies, authentication toolkits and computerized security and monitoring systems and machinery are all on the market for large-scale (aerial) and hand-held (night-vision and body-heat sensors) situations. The “big data” dimensions to the intelligence extrapolated—again by computational tools —from mobile phone and other computing devices with inbuilt geo-tracking capabilities, are now embedded in the practices of contemporary statecraft (ascertaining the rights and privileges of citizenship and residency); biometric passports accompany digitalized library cards, online visa or welfare applications, and other sorts of networked topologies of legitimation in schools, universities and health services (Bosilica 2016). This move to digitized surveillance-by-design connects not only the policing of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ spaces that constitute conventional

Life and death at the digitalized border  171 legal understandings of landed, and maritime border jurisdictions, “technologies of extraterritorialization” as Joseph Pugliese argues (2014). These horizontal planetary surfaces are now interconnected vertically, via satellite technologies and airborne, automated devices as augmented technologies of extraterrestrialization. The topographical intelligence, digital and networked typologies that ensue are made possible through emerging technologies of calculation that can scan, mine and increasingly connect the databases of once separate jurisdictions (e.g., policing or intelligence gathering). These are now the object of state-funded and corporate R&D looking to refine techniques (using algorithms, machine-learning programs and artificial intelligence prototypes) for collating, sorting and monitoring where human beings are going, predict where they might go, what they might do next. The case of the extension, and expansion of border controls hundreds of kilometres out from the putative borders of ‘Fortress Europe’ underscore how these processes (topographical and morphological) are increasingly outsourced to private actors, with state agencies presiding from a safe distance. To this end Cruz (2016) argues for the need to bring the state back into the analysis of criminal violence by examining the many ways in which the state directly contributes to violence…. [For example] by extending the legal limits of the use of legitimate force, by tolerating and supporting the employment of extra-legal approaches to deal with crime and disorder… while seeking legitimacy and constructing political authority. (Cruz 2016: 375) As another Latin American legal scholar observes, the privatization of gatekeeping at or within the borders also absolves said state-actor from being directly involved in the deaths. In other words, the “State does not kill directly unwanted groups of individuals. Rather, the State lets them die” (Bures and Carrapico 2017; França 2017; Mbembe 2019).

Challenges To recap, digital tools and computer-networked systems have a formative, indeed proactive and penetrative role to play in the embodied, physical and emotional toll of forced, even voluntary displacement. They also have a role to play in how people survive against all odds, in how support networks on the ground, and online, provide technical and other forms of support and sustenance for those in need, as well as looking to develop counter-narratives compete for social and broadcast media headlines. 5 These computer-mediated possibilities in the context of the above historical and political developments constitute a fast moving problematic for

172  M. I. Franklin publicly engaged scholarship into abuses of the human rights of refugees and asylum-seekers, their mistreatment and, all too often, numbers of “unlawful deaths” (Yacoub and Franklin 2018). The first challenge is apprehending the multiplex, and perplexing shifts taking place. Namely from physical to computer-generated and mediated geographies of direct and outsourced exercises of sovereign power and control over any population: e.g., through techniques of revisualization as images are recorded by drones, satellites and hand-held devices such as mobile-phone video footage. These are redrawing the cartographies upon which Westphalian legal, political and economic idioms of national sovereignty over a geographically delimited jurisdiction rest. International jurisprudence premised on customary law is being confronted by the legal challenges that these digital, networked interfaces and online archives of evidence present to judiciaries as the outcome of law enforcement and intelligence gathering based on digital knowledge-exchange. These same representatives of (inter-) governmental security measures take part in internet policymaking agendas that have been under pressure to incorporate human rights standards in any future visions for how internet technologies will be deployed for the purposes of state, or regional security. If the human rights of citizens in the online environment are now recognized as having substantive meaning and implications for future interpretations of existing international law and norms (Council of Europe 2014; La Rue 2011; UNHRC 2014), then it follows that the rights of refugees and any other displaced populations under international humanitarian law must also be recognized as having an online— digital and networked—dimension. Yet nation-states do not and cannot act alone in these emerging jurisdictional domains. For instance, the European Union, considered by legal scholarship into state crime as a “state-actor collective” (Ward and Green 2016), could be regarded here as a meta-state actor given its unique status as an international body that requires its member-states to submit to EUlevel laws and policies and yet provides them with a venue in which they can assert national interests (namely, to the Council of the European Union) respectively. Within this “organizational” remit (Ross 2003: 2) the European Union ends up operating as a conflicted agent, one that can only pay lip service to its obligations under international refugee law. Following Ward and Green, the “refugee crisis” of these past years is unfolding in a “multileveled legal space” (2016: 229). Ascertaining and then making accountable any category of “state-offenders” (Ross 2003) begs the question of the role that public opinion plays in exacerbating, let alone mitigating, the underlying racism of anti-immigration measures, and the violence and degradation of human life upon which the (privatized) detention and deportation of out-processed asylum-seekers are premised. Second, when advocating reform in detention centres, or when mobilizing against deaths in detention, the inconvenient truth often enough is that said “wider body politic” (Ross 2003: 2; Ward and Green 2016) can also sanction state-sponsored violence

Life and death at the digitalized border  173 against those considered as non-citizens, intruders. These body politics, locally and cross-border, can thereby condone morally reprehensible acts of violence committed on specific populations, minority groups or groups deemed to be not only threats to national security, but also to cultural identity and the social order. The historical record is replete with these scenarios within living memory, in Europe particularly. Therefore, it behoves any scholarly or activist discussion to pause, and ask: What happens when any “wider body politic” remains impassive to evidence of “social harm, moral transgression, and/or civil or human rights violation” (Ross 2003: 2)? These conundrums are germane to any discussion of the digital/networked dimensions to (1) gathering evidence of human rights abuses in the case of asylum-seekers, refugees and so-called economic migrants and (2) where and how best to mobilize on behalf of those subjected to such abuses at any point in their journey. For there is also evidence of collusion, of a “cynical quid pro quo” (Howden and Fotiadis 2017) within the European Union, one by which the squalid conditions or extended forms of enclosure and exclusion that characterize reception and processing of refugees is regarded as a de facto deterrent. Attitudes like this point to the wider malaise arising from the legalistic, literal thinking of judiciaries and political representatives as they deploy said “norms and values” of international humanitarian law in culturally exclusive ways. Likewise for how some governments have tacit public support for taking a tougher, more proactive line towards the de facto residency of refugees at or around national borders; fire-hoses being turned on to prevent people crossing into southern Europe, the violent clearing and dismantlement of the camp called the “Jungle” in Calais in 2016; the fire that destroyed Europe’s largest refugee camp, Moria in Greece in 2020, rendering 13,000 people without any shelter at all and, moreover, even more vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic as a result. Police harassment of those sleeping rough in Europe’s capitals, hostile reception in the media and punitive measures taken by successive British governments towards those attempting to cross the hazardous waters of the Channel from France in rubber dinghies, those children and adults who drown after their boats capsize, are other cases in point.

Reconceptualizing (cyber)security, (unwanted) populations, territory Unwanted populations arriving at, or moving through traditional geographical territories challenge state authorities at every step of the way. The rest of this discussion turns to a critical reconsideration of Foucault’s work on the pathology of the state-society dynamic in the troubled history of the (western European) nation-state. His full lecture series, finally being approached as a consecutive line of thought by Anglophone readerships, coincides with emerging debates in international law, political and social theory about the “cyberspatial” dimensions to how liberal governments

174  M. I. Franklin aim to govern but as noted above “not too much” (Foucault 1978/1991). It is in these lectures that Foucault makes much more explicit the inwardfacing manifestations of these procedures (to track, contain, curtail those already ‘inside’) but also to push outwards (against those ‘outside’ looking to be ‘let in’) in an ongoing quest for civic and geopolitical certainty. The time is ripe for considering this aspect to his thinking as it resonates with the need to incorporate the materiality and phenomenology of digital, networked and, thereby, planetary characteristics of supraterritoriality (Scholte 2002), cyberspatiality (Tsagourias 2015), and transnational breadth and depth of post-Westphalian internet governmentality (Franklin 2014, 2015). Stuart Elden asks in this context, “what happens to territory?” (2007: 563) as he posits that Foucault is putting aside his, more well-known, emphasis on geographical territory (how sovereign powers manage, discipline and so control populations within delimited physical space) in order to focus on how the agencies of sovereign power look to manage, and so control populations (Elden 2007: 563, note 2). Elden concludes that the “same kinds of mechanisms that Foucault looks at in relation to population are used to understand and control territory… [and]… in an era of security both territory and population are understood in a transformed sense” (Elden 2007: 578). If this counts for physical territories—political categories of space—then it can also count for those that are under formation through algorithms, traversed in the online environment. Refugees, ‘economic migrants’ and asylum-seekers are also populations, citizens of somewhere when not unwanted populations elsewhere. Their movements through and across any number of legal jurisdictions—cyberspatial, air, landed, or maritime—are, in this respect, the object of existing forms of state-actions, as well as all manner of intergovernmental undertakings to manage populations outside sovereign territories. To put it another way, the digitalized ability to patrol and so circumvent the inner and outer limits of any said physical territory (state borders, maritime borders, shorelines) implies an additional genus of operations. These reconfigure existing jurisdictional “politics of calculation” (Elden 2007: 578) and, with that, seek to police a notion of cyberspatiality; a politicized category of ‘networked’ space in which digitally constituted, datafied taxonomies of at-home and mobile, displaced populations become manifest. There are, at least, two contradictory dynamics at work here grosso modo; first the disciplining functions of state agencies and their concomitant sociocultural, political and economic institutions that legitimize and rationalize this latter-day moral imperative. Second, there are the unexpected effects of security imperatives in a historical context in which militarized interventions, coordinated or singular acts of violence do not emanate primarily from state-actors and their historical recourse to casus belli alone. For political representatives, intelligence services and law enforcement agencies, the threat of attack from within, by globally networked aggressors, justifies

Life and death at the digitalized border  175 programs that extend and deepen, rather than curtail invasions into people’s lives online and offline. As Elden notes, citing Foucault: While discipline operates through the enclosure and circumscription of space, security requires the opening up and release of spaces, to enable circulation and passage….Discipline is centripetal, while security is centrifugal: discipline seeks to regulate everything while security seeks to regulate as little as possible and, rather, to enable, as it is, indeed, laissez-faire; discipline is isolating, working on measures of segmentation, while security seeks to incorporate, and to distribute more widely. (Elden 2007: 565) Whilst at present there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that this double movement is being coordinated in the sense of an ideological program (Pugliese 2013; Topak 2014), its contradictory consequences are being constantly exposed along the EU and UK borderline, thrown in to stark relief during the Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions. This is where citizens coming and going, as well as refugee populations coming and going confront the forces of national security (intelligence and data-mining, meta-data gathering and predictive programs for anti-terrorism legislation) as they work with those of national sovereignty (customs officers, borderguards, immigration detention-centres, public service record-keeping). The point that bears repeating is that these are often state organs in name only given the prevalence for outsourcing of these ‘services’ to private firms. The EU Border Agency, Frontex, as a private-sector actor, is not answerable to elected political representatives but to the European Council. Summing up: Apparatuses of border/national/cyber-security push outwards in a series of centrifugal effects as they refine a matrix of physical and digitally encoded forms of deterrence and containment. To this end, the externalization of bordering, by setting up detention centres in other jurisdictions (from the United Kingdom in Libya to Australia, on Manus Island, or the Pacific island of Nauru), and the aforementioned systems of extraterrestrialization become “standard operating procedure” as technological prototypes evade the public scrutiny of human rights-based assessments. Agreements to exchange knowledge via databases that are made up of people’s personal communications and other indicators of identity (e.g., as is the case in a series of undertakings with Interpol and Europol) are becoming par-for- the-course, despite the comprehensiveness of regulations around data-retention at the EU level that have been encapsulated in the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Digitalized networks of discipline and prosecution now embrace and encircle citizenries under 24/7 surveillance, online and on the street, and they include detaining anyone at the border. These centripetal effects corral and monitor people at home, and people on the move whilst pushing the terms of engagement outwards—centrifugally.

176  M. I. Franklin The deployment of tailor-made tools, along with commandeering the databases accruing to commercial operators, to track and restrain any targeted population as they move, in whatever incarnation, places ordinary citizenries and these unwanted others alongside each other when it comes to the black letter of existing human rights law. Debates on the conceptual and legal status of the notion of cyberspace notwithstanding (Fidler 2015; Holmes 2007; Tsagourias 2015), the way in which governments, businesses and ordinary people access and enter these (cyber)spaces through internetembedded goods and services has implications for how human rights norms and laws will be interpreted and, more controversially, augmented as jurisprudence. Whilst any responsibility and eventual culpability for the inhumane reception of asylum seekers remains moot, the policing of Europe’s internal and external borders has become an outsourced, quasi-privatized undertaking that now unfolds at the online-offline nexus of operations, enforcement and future agenda-setting at the national and EU levels of consultation, due diligence and prevarication.

Resistance—along the borderline—is not futile Does this, however, mean that there is no possibility to resist, through direct action or other modalities of protest, to fight back and change the terms of debate if not rules of the current game, both on the ground (e.g., in detention centres, camps) or at borders (where physical violence is being perpetrated if not condoned)? There are many examples of individual acts, local community organization to support refugees, to show solidarity in acts of kindness, or by breaking the law when rescuing asylum-seekers from life-threatening situations in the face of unmitigated public hostility. Nonetheless, for devising programs of resistance that include online articulations, that deploy digital tools and web-services (e.g., smartphones to blogs or social media platforms) the task is to ascertain at which point these schizoid tendencies of state-sanctioned bordered violence provide openings to mount a defence of those whose physical and emotional well-being, let alone survival are under attack. But resistance cannot be undertaken, nor analysed in ways based on the usual, simplistic binaries: e.g., us versus them, online versus offline actions, new versus old media. As noted above, nor is it sufficient to evoke the sense of body politics, reasonable publics, as a self-evident moderating force. Direct action and awareness-raising about the political crimes being perpetrated in the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and along the land-routes criss-crossing the internal European borders, have yet to gain any public traction, or emerge as a transnational countermanding conversation. Yet resistance in these digitally embedded contexts is possible. It is taking place in a myriad of ways and by any means available: from providing Wi-Fi connections at the border, or phone batteries and chargers, to fighting disproportionate legislation in national and international courts, to developing cross-border and cross-sector education and

Life and death at the digitalized border  177 organizational strategies, within but also beyond academe to change public and political opinion. This potential can be overlooked when focusing on the increasingly hitech, ‘smart’ specifications of border gatekeeping. For example, stretching back to before the start of this century, the record shows how alternative, independent media outlets report incidents, call perpetrators of violence and other abuses to account by bearing witness online, by deploying and repurposing commercial social media platforms or open-source tools, or occupying spaces on the web to organize and express localised and international condemnation of human rights abuses. If deaths at the border, at sea, and within legally constituted detention centres can be seen as an international crime, and agencies contracted to, or by state signatories to international human rights conventions as willing accomplices, if not accessories to the crime, then resistance can start as litigation in the courts, as well as mobilizing on the streets, and online. For organizing resistance, within and across physical and digitally encoded borders—including where local groups can interact with those populations needing assistance—the offline versus online dichotomy needs addressing in a strategic way.

Conclusion It is time to reconsider bordered territories in ways that do not denote necessarily physical landmasses; longstanding maritime borders and airspace matter in this context as do those being demarcated in cyberspace as governments both vie, and collaborate with powerful corporations in setting the terms of access and use for internet-dependent goods and services. The historical and digitally reconfigured (cyber)borders of Fortress Europe are zones of violence that witness daily the abrogation of human rights, the dehumanization of populations in distress. This online-offline nexus of politicized and psychological and, the more obvious forms of, physical violence underscores the push-and-pull of public-private conglomerations of centripetal discipline and centrifugal security imperatives. These both exacerbate and entrench the inhumane dysfunctionality of the Westphalian state system, rendering agencies implacable in the face of documented human suffering. Critical scholarship that hopes to influence policymakers and judiciaries can take the lead here in several respects: First, to develop robust modes of analysis that can defuse the political payoff of the above forms of binary thinking that also undergird xenophobic and racist public discourses on the one hand and, on the other, the dismissal of human rights activism at the online-offline nexus as irrelevant. Second, there needs to be not just theoretical but also ongoing activist and political work to change the “social meaning” of (legal, political, social) resistance to human rights abuses wherever they occur in ways that can fully include the digital. Whilst human bodies remain the target of privatized as well as officially condoned violence, administrative negligence and public indifference to the plight of

178 M. I. Franklin thousands currently stuck in refugee camps, held indefinitely in detention centres, or those sleeping rough along the EU’s now infamous refugee highways, the digital ramifications need considering also as a “multileveled legal space” (Ward and Green 2016: 229). In this respect, there needs to be crossdisciplinary undertakings that can multiply singular notions of liability in order to incorporate the online-offline nexus where (organizational) perpetrators and their accomplices now operate, and with impunity. These framings are key to developing social media campaigns, avenues for investigative journalism and community education that can provide alternatives to public discourses that continue to construct asylum, migration and multicultural citizenship as a security threat. This means theorizing and researching as well along multi-dimensional axes of analysis and response—scholarly, legal, advocacy and policy-based. This means accepting the ‘digital’ and the ‘networked’ as integral to the power dialectics of future human rights jurisprudence in the post-Westphalian cyberscapes of this century.

Notes 1 This article draws on case studies from the UK/EU Hub of Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies. Many thanks to Raed Yacoub for the research collaboration. 2 The Deathscapes project is based on this ambition. As is the work of the Forensic Architecture research group, Open-Source journalism from the Bellingcat online collective, and the Centre of Investigative Journalism. 3 This chapter is an updated and revised version of an article published in Alexander and Kasm (2018). 4 Google, for instance, processes the personal data that makes up the digital footprints of a billion people per day. And Facebook can claim that over three billion, close to half this planet’s inhabitants, are registered as a member of its global “community”. 5 One example is the Euro-Mediterranean Resources Network based in Brighton, UK at https://www.euromernet.org/. Another is Qisetna at https:// www.qisetna.com/, a website founded by Syrian refugees aimed at “helping to connect Syrians living in Europe and beyond, with others who have also left their home country”. The UN Migration Agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has taken to social media for awareness-raising campaigns in line with other international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. See Topak (2017) for how people cooped up in refugee camps in Greece organized direct action with local activist groups and NGOs.

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180  M. I. Franklin Elliot, Larry, 2016, “Number of People Displaced by Conflict ‘Equivalent to UK Population of 65m’”, The Guardian, 15th September 2016; https:// www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/15/number-of-people-displacedby-conflict-equivalent-to-uk-population-of-65m Fidler, David P., 2015, “Cyberspace and Human Rights”, in Research Handbook on International Law and Cyberspace, Nicholas Tsagourias and Russell Buchan (eds.). Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 94–117; https://doi. org/10.4337/9781782547396.00014 Foucault, Michel, 1991 [1978], “Governmentality”, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault, G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 87–104. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226028811.001.0001 Foucault, Michel, 2004a, “Naissance de la biopolitique”, in Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979, Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard: 818–825. Foucault, Michel, 2004b, “Sécurité, Territoire, Population”, in Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978, Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard: 719–723. França, Leandro Ayres, 2017, “Violence and Punishment in Brazil”, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 6 March, 2017; https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/ resources/violence-and-punishment-brazil Franklin, M. I., 2014, Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance and the Internet. New York/London: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ acprof:osobl/9780199982691.001.0001 Franklin, M. I., 2015, “(Global) Internet Governance and its Civil Discontents”, in Cybersecurity: Human Rights in the Age of Cyberveillance, J. Kulesca and R. Balleste (eds.). New York/London: Rowman and Littlefield: 105–128. Franklin, M. I. and Yacoub, Raed, 2017, “Alan Kurdi and the Boat,” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies. https://www.deathscapes.org/ case-studies/alan-kurdi-and-the-boat Fraser, Nancy, 2007, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World”, Theory, Culture, and Society 24 (4): 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407080090 Gilroy, Paul, 1993, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press Guterres, Antonio, 2015, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: Opening remarks at the 66th session of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme, Geneva, 5 October 2015; https://www.unhcr. org/5613ac119.html Hall, Stuart, 1996, “New Ethnicities”, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, D. Morley and K-H. Chen (eds.). London/New York: Routledge: 442–451. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203993262 Heller, Charles and Pezzani, Lorenzo (directors), 2014, Liquid Traces: The Leftto-Die Boat Case, online animation, Forensic Architecture: https://forensicarchitecture.org/programme/news/liquid-traces-the-left-to-die-boat-case Heller, Charles and Pezzani, Lorenzo, 2015, Death By Rescue: The lethal effects of the EU’s Policies of Non-Assistance at Sea, online animation. Forensic Architecture; https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ death-by-rescue-the-lethal-effects-of-non-assistance-at-sea Holmes, Brian, 2007, “Future Map or How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love Surveillance’”, in Continental Drift: The Other Side of

Life and death at the digitalized border  181 Neoliberal Globalization Blog; https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/ future-map/ Howden, Daniel and Fotiadis, Apostolis, 2017, “The Refugee Archipelago: The Inside Story of What Went Wrong in Greece”, in Refugees Deeply, 6th March 2017; https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/refugees/articles/2017/03/06/ the-refugee-archipelago-the-inside-story-of-what-went-wrong-in-greece La Rue, Frank, 2011, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression. Human Rights Council: UN General Assembly, A/HRC/17/27, May 16, 2011, www2.ohchr. org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf Mbembe, Achille, 2019, Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press; https:// doi.org/10.1515/9781478007227 Muižnieks, Nils, 2017, “High Time for States to Invest in Alternatives to Migrant Detention”, Human Rights Comment from the Council of Europe High Commissioner for Human Rights, Strasbourg, 31 January 2017. https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/high-time-for-states-to-investin-alternatives-to-migrant-detention Nico, 2007. The Frozen Borderline 1968–1970. CD complilation. Elektra – 8122– 74885-2, Reprise Records – 8122–74885-2, Rhino Records (2) – 8122–74885-2 (UK). Pugliese, Joseph, 2013, “Technologies of Extraterritorialisation, Statist Visuality and Irregular Migrants and Refugees”, Griffith Law Review 22 (3): 571–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2013.10877013 Ridley, Susan, 2016, “UN’s Michael Møller Reveals 17 Facts That Will Change Your Understanding of the Refugee Crisis”, Huffington Post UK, 14 May 2016: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/refugee-crisisfacts-un-michael-moller_uk_5734277ee4b01359f6866db0 Ross, Jeffrey (Ed.), 2000, Varieties of State Crime and Its Control. New York: Criminal Justice Press. Scholte, Jan-Aart, 2000, Globalization: A Critical Introduction. New York: St Martins Press. Topak, Özgün E., 2014, “The Biopolitical Border in Practice: Surveillance and Death at the Greece–Turkey Borderzones”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32: 815–833. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13031p Topak, Özgün E., 2017, “Migrant Protest in Times of Crisis: Politics, Ethics and the Sacred from Below”, Citizenship Studies 21 (1): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13621025.2016.1191428 Tsagourias, Nicholas, 2015, “The Legal Status of Cyberspace”, in Research Handbook on International Law and Cyberspace, Nicholas Tsagourias and Russell Buchan (eds.). Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar: 13–29. https://doi. org/10.4337/9781782547396.00010 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2015, “Worldwide displacement hits all-time high as war and persecution increase”, UNHCR, 18th June 2015; https://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2015/6/558193896.html UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2016, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015; www.unhcr.org/576408cd7.pdf UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2020, Figures at a Glance; https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html, accessed 11 December 2020

182  M. I. Franklin UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), 2014, Resolution A/HRC/26/L.24: Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development, Twenty-sixth session, Agenda item 3, UN General Assembly, 20 June 2014; http://daccess-ods.un.org/ access.nsf/Get?Open&DS=A/HRC/26/L.24&Lang=E Various, 2013. Borders, Deaths and Resistance. Theme Issue in Statewatch Journal: Reflections on the State and Civil Liberties in Europe 23 (3/4), 1 February 2014; https://www.statewatch.org/publications/journal/ vol-23-3-4-borders-deaths-and-resistance/ Ward, T. and Green, P. 2016, “Law, the State, and the Dialectics of State Crime”, Critical Criminology 24: 217–230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-015-9304-5 World Bank, 2016, Forcibly Displaced: Toward a Development Approach Supporting Refugees, the Internally Displaced, and Their Hosts. Washington DC: World Bank Group; https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25016 Yacoub, Raed and Franklin, M. I., 2018, “Jimmy Mubenga and the Plane,” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies; https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/jimmy-mubenga-case-study/ Yacoub, Raed and Franklin, M. I., 2019, “Yarl’s Wood – Death by Indefinite Detention”. Case Study in Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler Societies; https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/yarls-wood/.

10 Fatal prescriptions Immigration detention, mismedication and the necropolitics of uncare Jonathan Xavier Inda On 20 October 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took Juan Carlos Baires, a 26-year-old native of El Salvador, into custody for being in the United States without documentation (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2011). He was detained in the Lerdo Pre-Trial Detention Facility in Bakersfield, California, pending the adjudication of his immigration case. Upon his arrival at Lerdo, Juan Carlos informed medical staff that he was HIV positive and that he had been taking antiretroviral medications. However, the facility failed to continue his medication regimen. Without HIV medicine, Juan Carlos was left vulnerable to an opportunistic infection (that is, an infection that takes advantage of a weakened immune system). About a week into his detention, he indeed developed an infection, a painful swelling in his left foot and ankle that left him barely able to walk. Juan Carlos sought treatment, and even though a facility doctor suspected an infection, he was not given antibiotics but simply anti-fungal foot cream and pain medication (Tylenol and Motrin). Without adequate treatment, his condition worsened until finally he had to be hospitalized. Juan Carlos never made it out of the hospital. By the time he arrived there, the infection (caused by Staphylococcus bacteria) had spread throughout his body. He died on November 12. The death of Juan Carlos in immigration detention is by no means an isolated incident. Between October 2003 and February 2021, there were at least 219 deaths in ICE custody (AILA, 2021; US ICE, 2017), many of them also the result of grossly inadequate medical practices. A particularly significant problem that has plagued detention facilities is mismedication (FIAC, 2009; SLPC, NIPNLG, & Adelante, 2016; Woods et al. v. Myers et al., 2007), a principal factor in Juan Carlos’ death. By mismedication, I mean broadly the practice of inadequately medicating detainees. This includes not just providing the wrong medication or incorrect, insufficient and inconsistent doses, but also the failure to dispense ordered medications, the use of pain medicine as a substitute for diagnosis or more substantial care, delays in starting medications and providing refills, and the failure to prescribe medications. Pharmaceuticals have, of course, become indispensable and necessary for the health and well-being of individuals and populations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-17

184  Jonathan Xavier Inda (Greene, 2010; Petryna & Kleinman, 2006; Wolf-Meyer, 2014). Antibiotics cure infectious diseases, immunosuppressants make organ transplants possible, cardiovascular medications help manage heart problems, vaccines prevent childhood illnesses, and psychotropic drugs help control depression (Greene et al., 2016, 1). So drugs can, among other things, cure diseases, make other treatments possible, slow down the progress of disease, prevent illness and mitigate symptoms. Yet, despite their indispensability as life sustaining technologies, medications are routinely mismanaged in the context of immigrant detention. Indeed, mismedication appears to be a rampant practice (FIAC, 2009; SLPC et al., 2016; Woods et al. v. Myers et al., 2007). And it is a highly dangerous one. Juan Carlos’s death is not the only one in which mismedication has played a role. For example, Lelis Rodriguez, who died of a stroke and hypertension, never received medication for high blood pressure, which he had been taking prior to being detained (HRW & CIVIC, 2017); José Leonardo Lemus Rajo died of complications from alcohol withdrawal after medical staff initially failed to administer medications that a physician prescribed for his symptoms (HRW et al., 2018); and Juan Guevara-Lorano was only given Tylenol for a severe headache that turned out to be a burst aneurysm (Priest & Goldstein, 2008). In this chapter, I examine detention care and its deadly consequences, with a focus on mismedication and the death of Juan Carlos Baires. The examination is based principally on NGO and newspaper investigations of the immigration detention system, in particular of deaths in detention, and on legal records (complaints, depositions, medical documents and so forth) from a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Juan Carlos’ estate against ICE, Lerdo staff and other defendants. My basic argument is that, rather than being beneficiaries of care, noncitizens in detention are often victims of uncare. As sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn has noted, care is “a practice that encompasses an ethic (caring about) and an activity (caring for)” (2000, 86). “Caring about” refers to affective disposition—to hold dear; to feel concern about, attachment to or interest in. It is about the way someone or something “comes to matter” (Stevenson, 2014, 3). “Caring for” involves the practical activity of looking after, providing for, protecting and sustaining someone or something. In the context of immigration detention, it is clear that there is a dearth or absence of both affective and practical care. Indeed, it appears that the detention system cares little about the well-being of detainees. Their lives simply do not matter. This lack of concern is reflected in the grossly inadequate practical care that noncitizens receive. The consequence of this uncare is that migrant lives are imperilled, with some detainees succumbing to death. To capture the death-making proclivities of detention care, I use the expression “necropolitics of uncare”—defined as a lethal politics of not caring about nor caring for. In what follows, then, I focus on uncare and death-making in immigration detention. I begin by discussing the necropolitics of uncare in relation to the expansion of immigration detention as a technology for governing noncitizens.

Fatal prescriptions  185

Immigration detention and the necropolitics of uncare In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault uses the term biopower to designate “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (1980, 143). Biopower thus amounts to the taking charge of biological life by political power. It points to how political and other authorities have assigned themselves the duty of administering bodies and managing populations in order to foster individual and collective life. As such, biopower is a life affirming power—one aimed at investing life and making it grow. Foucault also notes, however, that there is an underside to biopower. It is often the case, he suggests, that “entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity” (1980, 137). This means that biopower does not just foster life; it also routinely does away with life in order to preserve it. The reasoning here is that the death of the other—that is, of those deemed dangerous, unfit or diseased and thus a threat to individual and collective existence—will make life in general more healthy and pure. This death does not have to be direct death or the literal act of putting to death. It could also be indirect death: the act of exposing to death, of multiplying for some the risk of death, or simply political death, expulsion, rejection or exclusion. An essential characteristic of biopower is thus that the fostering of life is intimately connected to the production of death: some individuals and groups are allowed to die or put to death in the interest of nurturing the existence of others. Furthermore, biopower intrinsically involves the differential valuation of life. While some lives are judged worthy of protection, care and investment, others are deemed unworthy of being lived and discounted to the point of death. An outwardly life affirming power, then, biopower also has an exclusionary, lethal underside. Following Achille Mbembe (2003), we can call this underside necropolitics—that is, a politics of death. Significantly, the problematization and management of noncitizens in the United States, particularly undocumented immigrants, have been decidedly necropolitical (Rosas, 2019; Williams, 2015). Since the early 1990s, the country has witnessed rather strong waves anti-immigrant sentiment. From social scientists, immigration officials and policy analysts to immigration reform organizations and the public at large, it has been common for individuals and groups to cast undocumented migrants—typically imagined as Mexican and now increasingly also as Central American—as criminals who endanger the well-being of the general population and imperil the security of the nation (Chavez, 2008; Inda, 2006). Given this construction of the undocumented as threats to individual and collective life, the measures employed to govern them have been extremely exclusionary and punitive. Indeed, the fashioning of undocumented migrants (as well as other noncitizens) as undesirables has given rise to numerous measures to keep them out of the nation and to expel those already inside the social body (Dowling &

186  Jonathan Xavier Inda Inda, 2013). The logic here is that since the undocumented are seen as societal threats, their exclusion and elimination is deemed necessary in order to safeguard the well-being of the collective life of the nation. The repudiation of the migrant is thus justified in the name of protecting the life and welfare of each and all. But it’s not simply that noncitizens are being constructed as undesirable and excluded from the nation in the name of preserving the welfare of the population. Perhaps more importantly, the measures that have been designed to exclude and expel migrants have been deployed in such a way as to increase their risk of death. In many ways, the intense antiimmigrant climate has led to the development a “necropolitical enforcement regime” (Williams, 2015) in which migrant lives have been implicitly judged as expendable and not worthy of being lived. Such enforcement necropolitics is clearly instantiated in the immigration detention system. Over the past two and a half decades, detention has become an increasingly important, as well as profitable, technology for governing migration. Its importance is visible in the rise in the number of migrants detained and in the expansion of spaces of detention. In Fiscal Year (FY) 1994, for example, there were only 81,707 migrants held in detention (Taylor, 1995, 1107). By contrast, in FY 2008, there were 378,582 detainees (Reyes, 2018). And in the latest year for which we have figures, FY 2018, ICE detained approximately 396,448 noncitizens (US ICE, 2018). Since 1994, then, detentions have increased by close to 500%. To house its rising detainee population, ICE has developed a vast archipelago of carceral spaces. This archipelago is mainly composed of ICE owned Service Processing Centers (SPCs), privately owned prisons known as Contract Detention Facilities (CDFs), and Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) facilities—basically local and county jails (some of them run by private prison corporations on behalf of local governments) that contract with ICE to hold immigration detainees. The majority of detainees are held in spaces run by either private corporations or local governments (NIJC, 2015). While it is well known that private prison corporations, such as the GEO Group and CoreCivic, seek to generate profits from detaining migrants (DWN, 2016), it is also the case that local governments stand to benefit financially from human warehousing (NIJC, 2015). The delegation of immigrant confinement to entities that seek to generate profits has significant consequences. For one, this practice perversely produces pressure to increase detentions: the more immigrants confined, the higher the profits (DWN, 2016). Furthermore, in order to maximize profits, facilities will often reduce costs by skimping on providing immigrants with basic needs, for example, food and medical care (NIJC, 2015). Immigrant bodies have thus become valuable commodities whose worth lies in being placed and kept behind bars. The growth of the immigration detention archipelago is at base the result of a series of immigration laws passed in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. In 1988, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) introduced a new category of crimes, called “aggravated felonies,” for which a noncitizen (whether

Fatal prescriptions  187 undocumented or legal) could be deported (Rosenblum & Kandel, 2011). The ADAA defined aggravated felonies to include murder, any drug trafficking crime and illegal trafficking in firearms or destructive devices. This law also subjected noncitizens convicted of an aggravated felony to mandatory detention, meaning that they could not be paroled or released on bond, which was previously possible, but had to remain in custody while their removal proceedings were pending (Heering, 2010). Subsequently, in 1996, Congress passed two laws, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), that swelled the number of crimes considered aggravated felonies and for which noncitizens could be deported and mandatorily detained (Inda & Dowling, 2013). Furthermore, the AEDPA and the IIRIRA expanded mandatory detention to encompass additional categories of noncitizens, including asylum seekers (until they could establish a credible fear of prosecution), noncitizens inadmissible or deportable on crime-related (not just those with aggravated felonies) or national security grounds, noncitizens subject to expedited removal and persons under final orders of removal (Legomsky, 1999; Siskin, 2012, 5–6). With these 1980s and 1990s laws serving as a foundation, the federal government has pursued an aggressive program of immigration policing, both at borders and in the interior, that have funnelled more and more migrants into detention. For example, ICE has created a number of interior enforcement programs, such as Secure Communities and 287(g), in which they have enlisted local law enforcement entities in the policing of immigration. While these programs ostensibly target deportable “criminal aliens,” they typically also ensnare any migrant whose legal status is irregular (Inda & Dowling, 2013). All of these noncitizens end up in detention, many mandatorily, while being processed for deportation. The federal government has also expanded the use of “expedited removal,” a procedure that allows for certain noncitizens— generally those without proper documentation apprehended at a port of entry, or within 100 miles of a land border, who cannot demonstrate that they have been in the country for more than 14 days—to be removed without a hearing before an immigration court (AIC, NIPNLG, & ACLU, 2017). Such migrants are subject to mandatory detention. The necropolitical nature of immigration detention is closely connected to the inadequate provision of health care. As noted earlier, there were at least 219 deaths in ICE custody between October 2003 and March 2021 (AILA, 2021; US ICE, 2017), many under questionable circumstances and eminently avoidable. Since ICE typically releases very little public information about individual fatalities, it is difficult to know with certainty how many avoidable deaths have occurred, but the number is not insignificant. Based on an in-depth investigation that analysed confidential medical records and other sources, The Washington Post (2008) found that between March 2003 and March 2008 there were 30 questionable deaths in immigration detention. Human Rights Watch et al. (2018), based on

188  Jonathan Xavier Inda a similar type of investigation, identified 23 problematic deaths between March 2010 and May 2018. The vast majority of avoidable deaths involve inadequate and often grossly negligent medical care. While the quality of health care varies from one detention centre to another, in general substandard care afflicts the entire detention system. Besides mismedication, routine problems that plague detention facilities include denial of care, inadequate initial medical screenings and physical examinations, delayed or lack of response to sick call requests, unreasonable delays in obtaining off-site care, failure to monitor chronic conditions, improper mental health care and misuse of isolation, botched emergency responses and just generally mediocre care by facility and medical staff (ACLU, DWN, & NIJC, 2016; FIAC, 2009; HRW et al., 2018; HRW & CIVIC, 2017; NYLPI, 2017; Woods et al. v. Myers et al., 2007). Such practices of uncare have predictably resulted in the death of detainees. For example, there are the cases of a nurse ignoring acute symptoms of a heart attack; the misdiagnosing of a detainee with congestive heart failure; an inexplicable three-day delay in transferring a detainee with dangerously low oxygen to a hospital; poorly managed hypertensive cardiovascular disease; an officer refusing to call for emergency help, leading to a delay in responding to symptoms of a heart attack; and the solitary confinement of a detainee with psychosocial disabilities who subsequently committed suicide (HRW et al., 2018). This deadly disregard for migrant life in immigration detention can be characterized as a necropolitics of uncare. Indeed, migrants are dying because detention authorities do not care about nor adequately care for them. ICE is legally obligated to provide care for people in its custody, including those held in private detention centres and jails run by local governments (HRW, 2007). However, to the extent that migrants have been constructed as threats to individual and collective well-being, their lives are not really seen as worthy of concern, protection and care (Willen, 2002; Yarris & Castañeda, 2015). The result is the seemingly wilful creation of a substandard system of detention care in which many facilities have assembled minimalist and often deficient infrastructures of care that increase the risk of migrant death. I say “seemingly willful” because ICE is well aware that the detention care infrastructure is highly inadequate, yet has failed to take proper steps to improve it. Detention centres routinely suffer from infrastructural deficiencies such as inadequate staffing levels (i.e., insufficient numbers of overall staff); lack of qualified personnel (e.g., shortages or lack of physicians and mental health care workers); poorly trained and/or incompetent nurses, physicians and other medical professionals; staff operating outside the scope of their licenses; inadequate record keeping; substandard medical facilities; and deficient medical policies and procedures (ACLU of Georgia, 2012; HRW et al., 2018; HRW & CIVIC, 2017). Such infrastructural shortcomings, in turn, lead to poor health care practices and detainee fatalities.

Fatal prescriptions  189 What the creation of a deficient system of detention care, with its inadequate infrastructure, means is that migrants are essentially being abandoned to death. Casualties from detention uncare can therefore be thought of as “invisible killings,” to use Achille Mbembe’s (2003) terminology. In discussing the necropolitics of occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, he notes that the “orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure”—houses, cities, water tanks, electronic communications, roads, electricity transformers, airport runways, television and radio transmitters, computers and medical equipment—has become a critical component of the Israeli war against, and defence of the population from, Palestinians (2003, 29). This “infrastructural warfare” (Mbembe, 2003, 29) does not produce outright executions, but invisible killings. In other words, it does not kill enemies directly, but abandons them to death by destroying the material infrastructures that sustain life (Henao Castro, 2015). A similar situation plays itself out with respect to immigration detention. Migrants in spaces of confinement are not being killed as such but forsaken to death. In this case, however, the infrastructures that promote life are not so much destroyed as never quite built. The consequences are nevertheless very much same. By not building adequate infrastructures of care, vulnerable migrants are allowed to perish. They are allowed to perish in the name of protecting and nurturing the life of the national population—making it clear that migrant lives do not matter.

Abandonment by design: the mismedication of Juan Carlos Baires The case of Juan Carlos Baires is a clear-cut example of the necropolitics of uncare at work. There is little doubt that he received woefully deficient medical care in detention and was abandoned to death. Medical staff at Lerdo mismedicated Juan Carlos, neglecting to prescribe him HIV medication, and then failed to treat the opportunistic infection that consequently stricken him. Notably, Juan Carlos’ abandonment was intimately connected to the inadequate infrastructures set up to care for migrants at Lerdo. There, ineffectual medical staff and deficient medical policies and procedures (including poor record keeping) coalesced to produce conditions that put migrant lives in peril. We can characterize the situation at Lerdo as abandonment by design—a kind of regulated disregard. This means that the policies and procedures put in place at the facility to provide care, in particular for HIV/AIDS, were designed or structured in such a way as to ensure that detainees would not receive appropriate treatment. This structural deficiency was then compounded by the ineptitude and/ or sheer failure to care of the medical staff. To flesh out Juan Carlos’ abandonment by design, we can begin with the arrest that landed him in detention.

190  Jonathan Xavier Inda On September 18, 2008, Juan Carlos was arrested in Alameda County, California on the misdemeanour infraction of brandishing a deadly weapon other than a firearm (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013a). The charge was ultimately dismissed, but he ended up spending about a month in jail, at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Santa Rita facility in the city of Dublin. The day after his arrest, Juan Carlos was examined by medical staff at Santa Rita as part of their medical intake screening process (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2010). He informed them that he had HIV and was taking antiretroviral medications. Juan had tested HIV positive in October 2006 (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013b). And since January 2008, he had been receiving care at Highland Hospital Adult Immunology Clinic in Oakland. He was on a regimen of three antiretroviral medications: Lexiva, Norvir and Epzicom. The medicine had been working well to manage his illness. Given the seriousness of HIV, Santa Rita medical staff contacted Highland Hospital to confirm Juan Carlos’ diagnosis and medication regime. Upon receiving confirmation, a doctor at Santa Rita ordered that his medications be continued. He received antiretroviral therapy regularly during his time in jail. Another doctor also ordered laboratory tests to ascertain Juan Carlos’s CD4 cell count and viral load, which provided information about the health of his immune system and the amount of HIV in his body. Both his CD4 cell count and viral load were under control. Importantly, at some point during Juan Carlos’ incarceration in Alameda County, jail officials notified ICE about his arrest (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013a). Juan Carlos was in the United States without documentation and had been order removed from the country by an immigration judge. ICE consequently put an immigration detainer on him, asking jail officials to hold him up to 48 hours past his scheduled release date so that he could be taken into immigration custody. So, instead of being released from jail upon the resolution of his criminal case, Juan Carlos was turned over to immigration officials. ICE took custody of him on October 20 and transferred him to the Lerdo Pre-Trial Detention Facility, a local jail run by the Kern County Sheriff’s Office that had an IGSA contract to house immigration detainees. According to ICE detention standards operative at the time, when a detainee was moved from one facility to another, a medical transfer summary sheet had to accompany the individual (US ICE, 2004). The sheet needed to include, among other things, information about current medications and medical/mental health status. In addition, transporting officers were supposed to be provided with instructions, as well as any medications, needed to care for a detainee while en route. When Juan Carlos was relocated to Lerdo, a transfer summary sheet (or “Medical Information Transfer Form”) did indeed accompany him. However, it contained no information about his current health status nor medications. There was also no medicine sent with the transporting officers. Such procedural failures were apparently quite common with respect immigration detainees transferred to

Fatal prescriptions  191 Lerdo. Medical information sheets were routinely left blank and only about 10–15% of detainees were transported with any medications (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013c). Despite Juan Carlos arriving at Lerdo with an incorrect medical form and no medication, the facility became aware right away that he was HIV positive. Just like at Santa Rita, he informed medical staff during the intake screening process about his condition (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013d). In both an intake screening form and a progress note, a nurse recorded that Juan Carlos advised them that he had HIV, had last taken his antiretroviral regime earlier that day, and that, prior to his arrest, he was being treated at Highland Hospital. He also let them know that he was Spanish speaking. The day after his arrival at Lerdo, Juan Carlos was seen by a jail physician who conducted a basic health screening (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013d). The screening appears to have been rather cursory, taking only 10–15 minutes. The doctor recorded that Juan Carlos was HIV positive, but that he had stopped taking antiretroviral medications while at Santa Rita. This note contradicted the information recorded by the nurse the previous day. A key reason for the doctor’s inaccurate medical history seems to be that he failed to use a translator when evaluating Juan Carlos, who was a Spanish speaker, resulting in miscommunication. It also appears that doctor simply neglected to read the medical history recorded by the nurse, even though it was written just above his entries in the same medical chart. Acting on inaccurate medical information, then, both the one he recorded and the empty medical transfer form, the physician did not provide Juan Carlos any HIV medication. Instead, he asked his staff to schedule an appointment for Juan Carlos with the Kern County Medical Center Immunology Clinic. Such appointments generally took time to schedule, in this case about three weeks. And the appointment was only for a consult, not for medication. The doctor also instructed the staff to obtain Juan Carlos’s medical records from Highland Hospital. The staff sent a fax to the hospital, but never received a response. While waiting for his appointment, Juan Carlos received no care at all for HIV. For example, there was no laboratory work ordered to determine the progression of his HIV status, and hence his risk for becoming ill. In general, it appears that his condition elicited little concern from medical staff. There was no effort to follow up with Highland Hospital after they failed to respond to the fax requesting his medical records. And there is also no indication that any attempts were made to contact Santa Rita to get an accurate medical history for Juan Carlos. Contacting his previous place of incarceration would have been important given that he purportedly stopped taking his HIV medication there and considering that it was common for immigrant detainees to arrive at Lerdo with incorrect medical transfer forms. The failure to continue Juan Carlos’ antiretroviral regime and to provide him with any HIV care was in many ways by design. The unwritten policy and standard practice at Lerdo were to send HIV positive detainees to an

192  Jonathan Xavier Inda outside clinic for care instead of examining them at the facility (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013b). This custom of non- examination meant that there were typically no efforts made to evaluate or monitor the condition of HIV detainees at the jail itself: no individualized assessment of a detainee’s risk, no examination of medical records to determine medication needs, and no tests to evaluate the status of an individual’s disease. Lerdo also appeared to have no protocol for obtaining medical information from other spaces of incarceration when a detainee arrived with a blank medical transfer form and/or without medications. This lack of protocol was important because the doctor who saw Juan Carlos did not, as a rule, prescribe HIV medication to a detainee unless the person arrived at the clinic with medicine in hand. Given that securing an appointment with an outside clinic took some time, the policies of non- examination and nonprescription foreseeably created gaps in care. In other words, standard operating procedures at Lerdo ensured that HIV positive detainees would receive delayed treatment, if they received any treatment at all. Such institutionalized delays posed a serious health risk for detainees. Antiretroviral therapy has proven effective at managing HIV in affected individuals (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013d). However, in order for the medication to be helpful, it has to be taken consistently. Interruptions in care can have highly negative consequences: ceasing to take antiretrovirals can lead to a rapid deterioration of the body’s immune system, making a person vulnerable to life threatening infections (Ruiz et al., 2007). This scenario is exactly what happened to Juan Carlos. On November 4, 2008, a little of over two weeks after arriving at Lerdo, Juan Carlos submitted a sick call request for a medical emergency (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013b, 2013d, 2014). He had developed a painfully swollen left ankle on which he could barely put any weight. Initially, Juan Carlos was only seen by nurses, who provided him with pain medication and athlete’s foot cream. It appears that the nurses made no effort to establish the reason for the swollen ankle. Eventually, three days after submitting his emergency request, Juan Carlos was seen by a physician, the same one he saw the day after his arrival at Lerdo. The doctor suspected that he might have osteomyelitis, a serious bone infection. But rather than giving Juan Carlos antibiotics or sending him to an emergency room from prompt evaluation and treatment—such courses of action would have been prudent given that Juan Carlos had HIV and was not on antiretroviral therapy—the doctor provided him with crutches and prescribed more pain medication (Motrin). He also ordered X-rays, blood work and tests to confirm his diagnosis, but on a routine basis (as opposed to rushed). Given that the doctor saw Juan Carlos on a Friday, blood work was only drawn on Sunday-Thursday and X-rays only taken on Wednesdays, this meant that it would be days before any information was available. When blood results eventually came in, they confirmed that

Fatal prescriptions  193 Juan Carlos indeed had an infection. However, it appears that the results were ignored. A few hours after the blood results arrived at Lerdo, on November 11 at 12:25 am, Juan Carlos went to the jail infirmary complaining of terrible pain in his left foot. The nurse who saw him also recorded that he had a low temperature, an elevated pulse and low blood pressure. These bodily readings combined with the positive blood results and the preliminary diagnosis of bone infection meant that Juan Carlos met the diagnostic criteria for sepsis (basically, the infection had spread throughout his body) and needed immediate emergency care. Inexplicably, it would be another 4 hours before the nurse sent him to the emergency room at Kern County Medical Center. At that point, it was too late. Juan Carlos died the next day on November 12th. The bacteria infecting his foot, staphylococcus, had spread, causing pneumonia, shock, inability to clot blood, respiratory failure and kidney failure. There is little doubt that Juan Carlos was the tragic victim of uncare. To begin with, the policies and procedures in place at Lerdo to care for HIV positive detainees made it difficult for him to receive proper treatment. If the facility had policies that ensured continuity of care—that made it possible for Juan Carlos to continue receiving his antiretroviral regime—it is almost certain that he would not have died in detention (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013d, 2014). As noted earlier, when medical staff at Santa Rita conducted tests to measure his CD4 cell count and viral load, the numbers came back normal. But when he was tested again at Kern County Medical Center on November 11, the numbers showed that he met the diagnostic criteria for AIDS. Thus, the failure to provide him with antiretroviral therapy over the course of his three-week detention at Lerdo resulted in Juan Carlos developing full blown AIDS. This diagnosis meant that his immune system was severely comprised, making him highly susceptible to opportunistic infections. Beyond the problem with policies and procedures, medical staff at Lerdo demonstrated a basic lack of competence. If the doctor had sent Juan Carlos to an emergency room when he suspected osteomyelitis instead of simply ordering tests on a routine basis, or if the nurse had referred him immediately to emergency care when he show up at the infirmary rather than waiting four hours, he still might have survived (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013d). It is also clear that medical staff simply failed to care. In a letter to his girlfriend, Juan Carlos wrote: I have a problem with my left foot. It is very swollen. I can’t walk and I can’t sleep at night because of the pain…. I am writing the letter little by little because the pain will not let me do anything. I don’t eat. The pain takes away my appetite. I spend my time crying like I’ve never cried before. (Baires et al. v. United States of America et al., 2013e)

194  Jonathan Xavier Inda So Juan Carlos was in severe pain because of his infected foot, but the medical staff didn’t care enough to do much about it. If they had cared at all, he would still be alive. Ultimately, Juan Carlos’ death was a death from uncare.

Conclusion Immigration detention in the United States is not supposed to be punitive in nature. Noncitizens are not detained as punishment for a crime, but for the purpose of processing their immigration/asylum cases. However, the reality is that the immigration detention system is highly punitive—lethally so in some cases. As I have noted, migrants in the United States have typically been constructed as dangers to individual and collective life. Thus, the measures designed to manage this population have been decidedly exclusionary, focused on keeping them out of or expunging them from the country. The logic here is simply that the rejection of migrant is necessary in order safeguard the collective life of the nation. Importantly, immigration enforcement measures have not been merely exclusionary, but deeply necropolitical. Indeed, they have been deployed in such a way as to put migrant lives at risk. The necropolitical orientation of immigration enforcement is quite evident with respect to custodial spaces. It is clear that migrant life has little value in detention. Migrants are basically not seen as worthy of concern and protection. The medical infrastructures developed to care for them are woefully inadequate, leading to poor care or no care at all. In turn, this uncare results in suffering and death. The depravation of health care in essence functions as a form of punishment that kills—invisibly. All in all, then, the message that the immigration enforcement practice of human caging sends is that in order to safeguard the life of the population ICE, and the federal government more generally, is more than willing to tolerate a few casualties. It is that migrant life is superfluous—not quite worth living.

Acknowledgements This is a slightly update version of an article published in Death Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07481187.2020.1771852

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Fatal prescriptions  197 Priest, D., & Goldstein, A. (2008, May 11). System of neglect: As tighter immigration policies strain federal agencies, the detainees in their care often pay a heavy cost. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/cwc_d1p1.html Reyes, J. R. (2018). Immigration detention: Recent trends and scholarship. Center for Migration Studies. Retrieved from https://cmsny.org/publications/ virtualbrief-detention/ Rosas, G. (2019). Necro-subjection: On borders, asylum, and making dead to let live. Theory & Event, 22(2): 303–324. Rosenblum, M. R., & Kandel, W. A. (2011). Interior immigration enforcement: Programs targeting criminal aliens. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc83991/m1/1/high_res_d/ R42057_2011Oct21.pdf Ruiz, L., Paredes, R., Gómez, G., Romeu, J., Domingo, P., Pérez-Alvarez, N.,  The Tibet Study Group. (2007). Antiretroviral therapy interruption guided by CD4 cell counts and plasma HIV-1 RNA levels in chronically HIV-1-infected patients. AIDS, 21, 169–178. Siskin, A. (2012). Immigration-related detention: Current legislative issues. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/ library/P6175.pdf Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, & Adelante Alabama Worker Center. (2016). Shadow prisons: Immigration detention in the South. Retrieved from https://www.splcenter.org/ sites/default/files/ijp_shadow_prisons_immigrant_detention_report.pdf Stevenson, L. (2014). Life beside itself: Imagining care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, M. H. (1995). Detained aliens challenging conditions of confinement and the porous border of the plenary power doctrine. Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 22, 1087–1158. The Washington Post. (2008, May 10). A closer look at 83 deaths. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/ immigration/map.html US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (2004, June 16). ICE detention standard: Detainee transfer. Retrieved from https://www.ice.gov/doclib/dro/ detention-standards/pdf/DetTransStdfinal.pdf US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (2017). List of deaths in ICE custody. Retrieved from https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ detaineedeaths-2003-2017.pdf US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (2018). Fiscal year 2018 ICE enforcement and removal operations report. Retrieved from https://www.ice.gov/ doclib/about/offices/ero/pdf/eroFY2018Report.pdf Willen, S. S. (2012). Special issue introduction. Migration, “illegality,” and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness. Social Science & Medicine, 74, 805–811. https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.socscimed.2011.10.041 Williams, J. M. (2015). From humanitarian exceptionalism to contingent care: Care and enforcement at the humanitarian border. Political Geography, 47, 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.01.001

198  Jonathan Xavier Inda Wolf-Meyer, M. (2014). Therapy, remedy, cure: Disorder and the spatiotemporality of medicine and everyday life. Medical Anthropology, 33, 144–159. https://doi. org/10. 1080/01459740.2013.792812 Woods et al. v. Myers et al. (2007). Complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief. Docket No. 3:07-CV-01078-DMS-PCL (SD Cal, June 13). Yarris, K., & Castañeda, H. (2015). Special issue introduction. Discourses of displacement and deservingness: Interrogating distinctions between “economic” and “forced” migration. International Migration, 53, 64–69. https://doi. org/10.1111/imig.12170

Part IV

Aesthetic witnessing in the deathscape

Overview Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

Figure Part IV.1 C all to Account, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia. Deathscapes. Photo: Charandev Singh.

We organised the performance Call to Account across three Australian cities in response to the continuing deaths of refugees in mandatory detention in offshore camps funded by the Australian government. A line of participants, citizens and non-citizens, lined up to bear witness to the state’s murderous policies by reading out a set of charges against the state and calling it to account for the crime of “murder by mandatory detention.” The performance acquired an affective weight and mass through the repetitive reading of the charges and the heterogeneity of voices and bodies of those who bore witness to the suffering that was taking place out of sight, in the camps. Although the performance in some ways resembled a counter-tribunal or people’s tribunal, what was most powerful in the photographs and film to DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-19

Aesthetic witnessing in the deathscape  201 emerge from Call to Account was the affective force of an embodied, incantatory enunciation. Manifested in this act of witnessing was a collective grieving and lamentation that exceeds the legal confines of the courtroom in its call not only to law, but also to justice (Perera and Pugliese 2019). The chapters that follow take up acts of aesthetic witnessing in the deathscape. All three focus on buried histories of colonial massacre and how they may be uncovered and made visible anew in and for the present. In Chapter 11, Tess Allas and Ruben Allas introduce the work of three First Nations artists from Australia and Canada: Julie Gough, Laurel Nannup and Adrian Stimson. All were featured in the landmark exhibition, With Secrecy and Despatch, curated by two Indigenous curators, Tess Allas, from Australia, and David Garneau, from Canada. The exhibition commemorated the 200th anniversary of a massacre of the Dharawal people initiated by Governor Macquarie, at Appin, southwest of contemporary Sydney. In their chapter, Allas and Allas disclose how all three Indigenous artists speak back to settler massacres via an aesthetic of recovery and remembrance. For example, in their discussion of Laurel Nannup’s artwork, Quirriup, which represents a Western Australian settler massacre of the Binjareb Noongar people, they underscore how Indigenous communities have preserved and transmitted the historical memories of such atrocities, despite state burial and erasure of the facts. The collective Indigenous artworks on settler massacres, as discussed by Allas and Allas, effectively emerge from a type of anti-archive that refuses the archival silences of the settler state and that recentres its otherwise effaced violence in the colonial present. Allas and Allas comment on the visual technologies, including drone videos and digital filming, employed by the artists to bring to light the hidden histories of violence. For example, in the video installations Hunting Ground (Haunted) and Hunting Ground (Pastoral)—Hunting Ground (Haunted) Van Diemen’s Land, Gough returns to seemingly peaceful and pastoral sites of “settlement” in Tasmania, to reveal them as the ground of past massacres and killings. The videos are “a demonstration of our island as a crime scene; and a record of my reconnection with these places, establishing there, ensite, that we continue, were not entirely annihilated, and that we remember” (Gough, Chapter 11). Gough’s view of the island of Tasmania as a “crime scene” hidden in plain sight is elaborated by Antonio Traverso’s reflection on colonial massacres in Chapter 12: The episteme informing colonial massacres is … always linked to the mechanics of ethnic cleansing, that is, like bush logging, they are a technique of land clearing for settlement on newly possessed territories. Colonial massacres of Indigenous people in Australia are intrinsic components of the settlement technology … where massacres are continuous with other colonial tools, such as maps and observation devices. Traverso’s understanding of the “episteme informing colonial massacres” emphasizes that massacres are part of a continuum of settler colonial violence rather than isolated aberrations.

202  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese In his chapter Traverso presents a searching, in-depth analysis of two “interactive digital maps of political geographies of racialized state violence”— the Deathscapes site and the site Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1780 to 1930—focusing on each site’s use of mapping technologies and the “aesthetic articulation through which they engage their users.” He presents a critique of the Frontier Massacres site’s deployment of virtual globe technology centred on its privileging of a social-scientific, seemingly objective, approach and its “naturalisation of European mapping as the superior method of public representation of the past.” In doing so Traverso draws also on Indigenous deconstructions of colonial cartography, such as Warwick Thornton’s acclaimed film, We don’t need a map. In contrast to the Frontier Massacres site, Traverso views the Deathscapes site as a “visually relational surface” that employs “techniques of meta-visuality that reflexively subvert the naturalised use of the screen as a mere transparent window frame.” The reflexive and transgressive deployment of technologies such as drone footage and digital filming by Gough and Stimson (see Chapters 11 and 13) in their representations of colonial genocide and violence also stand in contradistinction to an uncritical adoption of colonial mapping technologies. In Chapter 13, Siksika artist Adrian Stimson provides a commentary on his engagement with different sites of Canada’s genocide against Indigenous peoples. He materialises through his artwork, As Above So Below, the transnational relations of settler power responsible for two settler massacres: the Cyprus Hill Massacre (Canada) and the Appin Massacre (Australia). The artworks presented in his visual essay speak to the scale of violence deployed by the settler state to secure its hold over expropriated Indigenous lands. This violence, that Stimson’s work bears witness to, encompasses the settler buffalo genocides which he describes as “analogous to the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.” In Stimson’s art the bison figures as a symbol of resistance, of change and resilience. Every time I draw, paint, sculpt, photo or perform the bison, I am honouring one of those 75 million slaughtered. In essence, my use of the bison in my work takes me back to a time where they were an integral part of our cosmology. I want to keep that tradition alive, to have the bison be a part of my daily life and through its use in my art, become an agent of change for not only myself but for all who see and believe that a future can be built without a colonial mindset. In Buffalo Boy, “a campy Two-Spirited Indian Cowboy based on Buffalo Bill and his wild west shows,” Stimson celebrates his affective and familial connection to the bison, while simultaneously queering, with verve and humour, white-hetero-masculinist-settler identities. Stimson’s Sick and Tired, Aggressive Assimilation and Tired Witness are all artworks that bear witness to the death, suffering and survival of Indigenous children who were processed through the institutionalised violence of

Aesthetic witnessing in the deathscape  203 Residential Schools. More than ever, these works are inscribed by a charged topicality. As we write, Indigenous-led teams using ground-penetrating radar in the grounds of a number of these Residential Schools have exposed the genocidal scale of the outright killing and letting die—through starvation, abuse and torture—of Indigenous children as over 1,100 bodies have thus far been discovered in unmarked graves: “Some estimates suggest 15,000 children may have died in the schools. Others say the true figure could be much higher” (Humphreys et al. 2021). Stimson’s artist statement, with its courageous and unflinching vision, is a fitting conclusion to this closing section of the volume. These chapters on acts of aesthetic witnessing bring into focus the complex dimensions and effects of aesthetic practices in the context of deathscapes. They speak to how art, once situated within loci of violence, trauma and death, can be mobilised as a form of witnessing, as a creative practice of resistance and survivance, and as a counter-testimony to state violence that enunciates what would otherwise remain unspeakable.

References Humphreys, Rachel, Leyland Cecco, Courtney Yusuf, Axel Kacoutié, Archie Bland and Phil Maynard. 2021. “The Indigenous Children Who Died at Canada’s Residential Schools.” The Guardian, July 9. https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/audio/2021/jul/12/the-indigenous-children-who-died-atcanadas-residential-schools (accessed 21 July 2021). Perera, S. and Joseph Pugliese. 2018. “Between Spectacle and Secret: The Politics of Non-Visibility and the Performance of Incompletion’ in Visualizing Human Rights ed. Jane Lydon. Perth: UWA Press, 85–99.

11 Artistic responses to historical and ongoing genocidal violence against Aboriginal women Tess Allas and Ruben Allas

“If revolution can give art its soul, then art can give revolution its mouthpiece.” Anatoly Lunacharsky (Quoted in Raunig 2007, 12) “July 31st 1998 … 22 years on and still no answers…. Our lives don’t matter in this country, they never have to the white colonial fucks we call government! Who killed my BLACK mother? One day we will find out, and finally be able to rest. RIP mummy, I love you.” Emily-Jane Roberts-Field, 31st July, 20201

Art and justice for Indigenous women and girls Art can contribute to achieve justice for the victims of genocidal violence (Dhillon and Allooloo, 2015). Whether it aims to educate or confront viewers on the horrific realities experienced by Indigenous women, such as the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls or deaths in custody (see Bui et al. 2017; Allas et al. 2018; Allam et al. 2020; also Chapters 4 and 5, this volume), when a relevant artwork is displayed in the public domain, it becomes a political statement or act—the mouthpiece of change. As to how artists create work to achieve this, “art follows its own laws,” even when it serves a social movement like achieving justice (Cutrone 2020, 5). In 2016, two years after Ms Dhu’s death, her family and friends, in an attempt at creating awareness of her death and the importance of her inquest and symbolically reclaim space for Aboriginal women and other marginalised victims of the ongoing colonialism, armed with a projector and laptop began driving around the city of Perth projecting haunting images of Ms Dhu onto prominent buildings including the West Perth lockup (Blue 2016; see also Bui et al. 2017). This performative act is just one of many creative responses by Aboriginal people, such as those memorialising and demanding justice for those who had died in custody since 1983, when the death of John Pat in Western Australian police custody sparked demonstrations demanding justice. Some of these artists were involved in the 2016

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-20

Artistic responses to genocidal violence  205 exhibition With Secrecy and Despatch, three of whom are discussed in the following section. In his 2017 exhibition Ripples of Loss, at the Art Gallery of St Albert, Alberta, Canada, Ojibway artist Terry McCue created a body of work memorialising the missing and murdered First Nations women and girls. Ripples of Loss is a series of 16 paintings depicting the skeletal remains of the missing women, each clothed in a red dress which has become synonymous with the artistic movement that calls for justice for these women (see Allas et al. 2018). The figures are (mostly) alone in various Canadian landscapes and it is their glare looking back at the viewer which leaves a haunting impression. Of this work, McCue said that he was compelled to produce it: I have been lucky enough in my life to have had the opportunity to follow my dreams. The missing and murdered Aboriginal women, who are the subject of these paintings, were not allowed this opportunity. And not only that, but they have also been denied justice in their deaths. I simply feel the need to stand up and speak for those who have no voice, because I can. (McCue 2017)

With Secrecy and Despatch One of the most significant art exhibitions that addressed historical and ongoing genocidal violence against Indigenous people in Australia and Canada was With Secrecy and Despatch, held at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2016 (Campbelltown Art Centre 2016). It was curated by two Indigenous curators, Tess Allas, from Australia, and David Garneau, from Canada and commemorated the 200th anniversary of the Appin Massacre. The title references the military orders issued by Governor Lachlan Macquarie to “inflict terrible and exemplary punishments” on the people of the Appin area of New South Wales (NSW State Archives and Records). Major General Lachlan Macquarie was governor of New South Wales 1810 to 1821. Celebrated by settler histories as foundational to the economic, cultural and architectural development of the British colony in Australia, he in fact left a legacy that officially legitimated Indigenous massacres in order to secure colonial settlement. The massacre at Appin—Macquarie’s war of 1816—of men, women and children, and the brutal dismemberment of dead Aboriginal men, whose body parts were subsequently sold as specimens in Europe by white settlers, was “not an isolated event, but a culmination of the unofficial war which has existed in Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in January 1788” (Organ 2014, 5), the aim of which was the expansion of white settlement. Like other acts of colonial violence, knowledge of this event was largely erased from history.

206  Tess Allas and Ruben Allas With Secrecy and Despatch featured commissioned works by six Aboriginal Australian and four, First Nations Canadian artists. Several of these artists responded directly to this event, others created works that dealt with the histories of colonial brutality, conflict, identity, culture and memory from their communities. To provide a bridge between the historical and the present and give relevance to the ongoing colonial violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, the curators included existing works by Aboriginal artists from Australia that contextualised significant themes explored in the exhibition and how they impacted on contemporary Indigenous art practice (Allas and Garneau 2018). In the following section we explore how three artists responded to the theme of With Secrecy and Despatch: Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Gough, First Nations Canadian artist Adrian Stimson and Noongar artist Laurel Nannup.

Julie Gough Julie Gough is a Trawlwoolway artist, writer and curator. She lives in Tasmania but was born in Melbourne. Her traditional homeland is Tebrikunna in far north eastern Tasmania. She holds a PhD and several BAs in Visual Arts, Prehistory and English Literature. Gough has exhibited widely overseas and in Australia. Her work is held in private collections and in major public galleries in Australia, including Campbelltown Arts Centre, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Galleries of NSW, South Australia, Western Australia and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Of her work, she says: “My art and research practice often involves uncovering and re-presenting historical stories as part of an ongoing project that questions and re-evaluates the impact of the past on our present lives.” For her work along this trajectory she is developing a visual language facilitated by modern technology backed up by impeccable research, which informs the historical texts that she places on occupied settler estates that she also identifies through research as sites of genocidal violence and conflicts. Her use of technology, such as digital filming and photography, combines with historical texts re-signify these settler estates as “crime scenes” (Pugliese 2017). By contemporising these historical events, and the fact that there has not been any significant redress made to Aboriginal people to both the killings and the land-grab history, often staid and academic histories are energized and then become a living and ongoing process, particularly in terms of white settler-Aboriginal relations; thus, Gough validates Australian-Aboriginal relations as “unfinished business.” Gough’s work for With Secrecy and Despatch was an installation of videos and prints collectively titled Hunting Ground, 2016. The two-part Hunting Ground (Haunted) and Hunting Ground (Pastoral)—Hunting Ground (Haunted) Van Diemen’s Land is a video installation showing

Artistic responses to genocidal violence  207 locations that Gough identified as sites of violent conflicts or brutalities committed against Tasmanian Aboriginal people, sites which are now or used to be occupied by white settlers and their descendants (Figures 11.1 and 11.2). At these sites I placed 10 recently produced etched and silkscreened text ‘posters’ relating from the multitudes of these murderous encounters. The resulting film is an articulation of otherwise, usually hidden histories; a demonstration of our island as a crime scene; and a record of my reconnection with these places, establishing there, ensite, that we continue, were not entirely annihilated, and that we remember. (Gough 2016) “Gough literally re-inscribes in these sites the effaced histories of massacres that continue to haunt the settler grounds that witnessed the murder of her people” (Pugliese 2017). Of the ten texts Gough showed as ‘posters,’ the one taken from the journal of George Augustus Robinson (Protector of Aborigines) in Richmond, Tasmania, 29 March 1832, shows in no uncertain terms the attitudes the settler colonial community had for Indigenous women and girls (Figures 11.3–11.5)—which continues to this day and its chilling echoes can be found in the case of Ms Dhu.

Figure 11.1 Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Installation View. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

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Figure 11.2 Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Installation View. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Figure 11.3 Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Installation View. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

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Figure 11.4 Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Detail. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Adrian Stimson Adrian Stimson (see also Chapter 13) is an interdisciplinary Blackfoot artist, a member of the Siksika Nation in southern Alberta, Canada. He has an MFA (University of Saskatchewan) and a BFA with distinction (Alberta College of Art and Design). Stimson has exhibited internationally and nationally. His work is held in private and institutional collections such as Campbelltown Arts Centre, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Glenbow Museum, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Mendel Art Gallery and the British Museum. Stimson’s art practice includes painting, installations and performances that focus on identity construction, particularly the hybridization of the Indian, the cowboy, the Shaman and Two Spirit Being. Two of his more significant recurring personas are Buffalo Boy and The Shaman Exterminator. Stimson’s paintings are varied. His depiction of the bison in imagined landscapes in black and white monochromatic paintings are well-known. These works are melancholic, memorialising and at times whimsical, but they also evoke cultural fragility, resilience and nostalgia. His installation work primarily examines and is informed by his lived experience in the residential school system. Particularly, he has used the material

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Figure 11.5 Julie Gough. Hunting Ground (Haunted), Van Diemen’s Land, 2016. Detail. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

culture from Old Sun Residential School on his Nation to create works that speak to genocide, loss and resilience (see Figures 13.8, 13.13 and 13.14). Adrian Stimson’s commissioned work for With Secrecy and Despatch, titled As Above So Below, memorialised two massacres: the 1816 massacre of 14 (and possibly more) Dharawal men, women and children in the Appin region of NSW, ordered and sanctioned by Governor Macquarie; and the Cypress Hills Massacre of Assiniboine people (Canadian Encyclopedia). The murder of 20 men, women and children in the Battle Creek Valley on 1 June 1873, by a vigilante group of American wolf and bison hunters and American and Canadian whiskey traders occurred on the pretext that Assiniboine people of Cypress Hills stole horses from them. It is one of many other acts of genocidal violence against Aboriginal Canadians perpetrated for the British colonial project in Canada, and this criminalisation of Indigenous peoples was part of the “colonial inversion of the victims into outlaws” as a moral justification for the expansion of white settlement (Pugliese 2018). The juxtaposition of the two sites, which are over 13,000 kilometres apart, visualises the parallel colonial histories of Aboriginal Australia and Canada. As Above So Below, a two-channel video of the actual sites of these massacres

Artistic responses to genocidal violence  211 was projected onto a blackened gallery wall painted black especially for this purpose (Figures 11.6 and 11.7). The film begins—sans imagery—punctuated by the sound of a heartbeat, followed by the deafening noise of a musket shot and the imagery of two longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates representing the two massacre locations, one for Appin on the left side of the ‘screen,’ and the other for Cypress Hills on the right (see Stimson, Figure 13.2). The Appin imagery shows the actual site of where the victims of the massacre were originally camped on that fateful night when they were set upon by Macquarie’s troops (Figure 11.8). This site is situated near the edge of a sandstone cliff at the base of the Cataract River. The Canadian imagery, taken a day after the Appin imagery was shot, shows a snow-scaped scene that includes a Fort. This landscape is the area in which the Cypress Hills Massacre occurred (Figure 11.9). Stimson’s use of drone video cameras to document these two sites contrasts with the technology’s early origin as a tool for remote and large-scale killing to a re-signified recorder of sites of historical massacres. More than this reversal of use, by using a drone to take videos of the sites to which he was denied access, he “breaches the law of private property and transgresses lines of interdicted access,” as well as the boundaries of colonial property. Like his forebears, Stimson becomes an insurgent and criminal in the eyes of the state still resisting the imposition of white-settler laws (Pugliese 2018).

Figure 11.6 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below, 2016. Installation View. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

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Figure 11.7 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below, 2016. Installation view. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Figure 11.8 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below, 2016. Detail. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Like Gough’s work which has a resonance with the Ms Dhu case, Stimson’s video resonates with the case of Ms Fontaine in Canada (see Bui et al. 2017; Allas et al. 2018). In Appin, it was reported back to Macquarie that mothers clutching their babies jumped off the cliff and faced their deaths in

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Figure 11.9 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below, 2016. Detail. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

the waters below rather than face their deaths at the end of a soldier’s gun. Ms Fontaine’s body was found sometime after she was reported missing in the Red River. Rivers and other water courses have been well-documented as places where the bodies of the victims of massacres and of other acts of brutality have been deposited in the hope of destroying any evidence of these acts (Allas et al. 2018). This act at hiding evidence of brutalities in water courses (known in Indigenous societies as ‘Rivers of Blood’) is documented in the work of Laurel Nannup, who was also an exhibiting artist, alongside Gough and Stimson, in With Secrecy and Despatch.

Laurel Nannup Laurel Nannup was born in 1943 at the Carrolup Native Settlement, Western Australia. She was the eldest of 17 siblings. She grew up in the bush around Pinjarra Reserve, Pinjarra. At the age of eight she and her six-yearold sister were taken from the reserve to live at Wandering Mission, which was run by an order of German catholic nuns, until she was 16 (Allas and Nannup). Nannup holds a BA in Fine Arts (2000) and Honours (2001) from Curtin University of Technology. She attended the inaugural Indigenous printmaking workshop at Cicada Press, UNSW Art & Design, in February 2012. She is a printmaker who works with lino, woodblock and etchings. Nannup is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Berndt Museum of Anthropology, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, The Netherlands. In her work Quirriup 2016 (second state) woodblock and screenprint on rag paper, Nannup memorialises the Pinjarra Massacre of 1834 (Figure

214  Tess Allas and Ruben Allas 11.10). “When I was a small girl growing up in the Pinjarra district my family would often talk about and tell stories of the Pinjarra Massacre of 1834. I have often wondered what happened to the old people who survived the massacre. This woodblock and screenprint work has helped give me a chance to tell a story and interpret the massacre through my families’ stories over the many years. My artwork of Quirriup represents a woman who was present at the time of the massacre. The story depicts a lone figure standing in front of her mia-mia next to a river of blood and a sea of floating bodies. I would like this exhibition to acknowledge my ancestors who died in struggle of this great tragedy and for this event to be in the minds of all Australians so that we can all learn from the mistakes of the past” (Nannup 2016). The official Western Australian account of what happened on 28 October 1834 was that it was a battle—the Battle of Pinjarra. Evidence and eyewitness accounts of the event put the casualties to one from a detachment of 25 soldiers, police and settlers led by Governor James Stirling and between 15 and 80 dead from a tribe of Binjareb Noongar people. In 1868, a Corporal Haggarty of the 63rd Regiment estimated a much higher Aboriginal casualty count of up to 200–300. Whatever the number, the “battle” was one-sided in favour of the colonial forces. As Chris Owen laments, If the encounter were really a battle, how was it that only one member of the attacking group of 25 people – the police superintendent – lost his

Figure 11.10 Laurel Nannup. Quirriup, 2016. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image Courtesy of the Artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

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life? The overwhelming evidence cited above of these extrajudicial killings leaves us in no doubt that the attack at Pinjarra was a massacre. Yet for more than 180 years, Western Australians were taught that it was a battle. (Owen 2019) Like many of the official records on the massacres, this is another attempt to sanitise the foundational violence that created Australia. The works of Indigenous artists who have responded to historical and ongoing violence against Indigenous people—especially against women and girls in Australia and Canada, and particularly, as discussed above, those works by Julie Gough, Adrian Stimson and Laurel Nannup—address many significant issues including: the persistent historical myopia on the role of violence in Australian and Canadian nation-building, the present trauma caused by colonial violence on Aboriginal families and communities, the resultant marginalisation of Aboriginal people due to land dispossession and lack of redress, and the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal-justice system. Collectively, these powerful artworks evidence the complex and layered intersection of Indigenous art practice, visual modalities of historical remembering and memorialisation, the mobilisation and collision of aesthetic categories, and the past and ongoing regimes of violence that are constitutive of the Australian and Canadian settler-colonial states. (Pugliese 2018)

Note 1 Emily-Jane Roberts-Field, Facebook post, July 31, 2020. Lois Martha Roberts was a mother of two children, and Emily-Jane is one of her children. Ms Roberts was last seen outside the Nimbin Police Station in Northern NSW on 31 July 1998 trying to hitch a lift back to her Lismore home. Her bound and tortured body was found by a bushwalker in Whian Whian forest six months later. Seventeen years prior to her disappearance she had a car accident that left her with permanent brain injury, but sufficiently rehabilitated to be able to care for herself. She was living on her own near Lismore. An inquest was held in June 2002. No one was charged for her murder, and her case is now with the Unsolved Homicide Team (see Allas et al. 2018).

References Allam, Lorena, Calla Wahlquist and Nick Evershed. 2020. “Aboriginal Deaths in Custody: 434 Have Died Since 1991, New Data Shows.” The Guardian, November 23, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/06/ aboriginal-deaths-in-custody-434-have-died-since-1991-new-data-shows. Allas, Tess and David Garneau. 2018. “Curatorial Statement: With Secrecy and Despatch.” Social Identities 25, no. 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2018. 1514097. Allas, Tess, Laurel Nannup, n.d. Design and Art Australia Online https://www. daao.org.au/bio/laurel-nannup/biography/

216  Tess Allas and Ruben Allas Allas, Tess, Michelle Bui, Bronwyn Carlson, Pilar Kasat, Hannah McGlade, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2018. “Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ indigenous-femicide-and-the-killing-state-in-progress/. Blue, Ethan. 2016. Art Project Puts a Powerful Spotlight on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Croakey, March 17, 2016. https://www.croakey.org/ art-project-puts-a-powerful-spotlight-on-aboriginal-deaths-in-custody/. Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2017. “At a Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms Dhu.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ms-dhu/. Campbelltown Art Centre. 2016. With Secrecy and Despatch. Accessed November 25, 2020. https://c-a-c.com.au/with-secrecy-despatch/. Canadian Encyclopedia. Cypress Hills Massacre. Accessed November 25, 2020. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/cypress-hills-massacrefeature. Cutrone, Chris. 2020. “Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno and Greensberg’s Critique of ‘Revolutionary Art.’” Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association in Chicago, “Another Revolution: Artistic Contribution to Building New Worlds 1910–30 (Part 1), May 20, 2020. Gough, Julie. N.d. Artist Statement. https://juliegough.net/artist-statement/. Gough, Julie. 2016. With Secrecy and Despatch room sheet, Campbelltown Arts Centre. Marcuse, Herbert. 2007. Art and Liberation. London: Routledge. McCue, Terry. 2017. Artist Statement, Ripples of Loss, Art Gallery of St Albert. http://artgalleryofstalbert.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/08/ TerryMcCueRipplesOfLoss-Catalogue-web.pdf. Nannup, Laurel. 2016. With Secrecy and Despatch room sheet, Campbelltown Arts Centre. NSW State Archives and Records. Massacre at Appin, 17 April 1816. Accessed November 25, 2020, https://www.records.nsw.gov.au/archives/collections-and-research/ guides-and-indexes/stories/massacre-appin-17-april-1816. Organ, Michael K. 2014. Secret Service: Governor Macquarie’s Aboriginal War of 1816. NSW: UOW. https://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/481. Owen, Chris. 2019. “The Pinjarra Massacre: It’s Time to Speak the Truth of this Terrible Slaughter.” The Guardian, November 18, 2019. https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/18/the-pinjarra-massacre-its-timeto-speak-the-truth-of-this-terrible-slaughter. Pugliese, Joseph. 2017. “Julie Gough’s Forensic Archaeology of National Forgetting.” In Julie Gough (Ed.), Hunting Ground. Virginia: Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. https://kluge-ruhe.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ Julie-Gough-with-essay-by-Joseph-Pugliese.pdf Pugliese, Joseph. 2018. “As Above So Below: Drone Visualities of the Aftermath, Testimonies of the More-Than-Human and the Politico-Aesthetics of Massacre Sites. Social Identities 25, no. 4: 457–475. https://doi./org/10.1080/130504630. 2018.1514159. Raunig, Gerald. 2007. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century. Translated by Aileen Derieg. New York: Autonomedia.

12 Looking into the world from somewhere else Mapping and the visualisation of racial violence in Australia Antonio Traverso Introduction In the current context of increasing use of virtual globe technology for social justice and humanities projects, this chapter presents a comparative analysis of the Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1780 to 1930 (henceforth “Frontier Massacres”) online map and the Deathscapes (2016–2020) (henceforth “Deathscapes”) website.1 In order to facilitate this analysis, the chapter addresses interrelated ideas in postphenomenology of technology and critical studies of visuality, decoloniality and Indigenous knowledges. To provide a comparative context, it makes brief analytical references to decolonising methods in films from Australia, Chile and Palestine. The Frontier Massacres and Deathscapes projects are considered together by virtue of their analogous characteristics as interactive digital maps of political geographies of racialized state violence. Besides this common thematic focus, both projects use the website format as the material platform for the public presentation of their content. The Frontier Massacres site is distinctively an interactive online map of Australia that uses virtual globe technology. 2 Deathscapes is presented as an arboriform, hyper-linked website, with multiple thematic links to external sources. As suggested by its sub-heading ‘Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States’, Deathscapes also understands itself as a kind of map. However, there is an underlying difference between these two online maps, namely, the aesthetic articulation through which they engage their users. In this respect, this chapter argues that in so far as the use of virtual globe technology in the Frontier Massacres map is reliant on a conception of technological apparatus as neutral, it appears to aim at a complete scientific knowledge of colonial massacres through an objectifying, ocularcentric vision; as such, the map contributes to reinforcing an epistemological coloniality. This proposition is dependent on the very different understanding: That massacres of Indigenous people must be understood as techniques constitutive of a complex colonial technology of settlement; one that functions through continuing processes of occupation and erasure, where massacres are continuous with other colonial tools, such as maps and observation devices. Comparatively,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-21

218  Antonio Traverso the chapter argues that Deathscapes appears as a non-ocularcentric, relational platform that uses interactive online technology for the purpose of critically mapping and dismantling racialized violence through manifest techniques of decolonisation.

The Colonial Frontier Massacres online map Among the many links to external resources found throughout the multiple sections of Deathscapes, one takes the user to the Frontier Massacres map, a project that seeks to dot-mark the occurrence of each historically documented colonial massacre on an online interactive satellite map of Australia within a demarcated timeline: 1788–1930. Hypertext links connect each dot visible on the Frontier Massacres map to a webpage with specific, documented historical data and records, and their sources, as well as a closer satellite map view of the site of the massacre. While “information about massacres of British colonists and others in Australia in the same period” is included in this map, the overwhelming majority of records refer to group killings of “thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children […] from 1794 when the first massacre was recorded until 1930” (Frontier Massacres). The project defines a colonial frontier massacre plainly as “the deliberate and unlawful killing of six or more defenceless people in one operation” (Frontier Massacres) and unambiguously explains the occurrence of massacres of Indigenous people as a function of the project of colonial settlement: From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued until the 1960s massacres became a defining strategy to eradicate that resistance. (Frontier Massacres) The Frontier Massacres map uses the emergent virtual globe technology to give the user easy access to data about colonial frontier massacres as collected by professional historians in their study of the Australian historical archive. It presents itself as an objective social-scientific response to the “history wars,” a public controversy that came to prominence in Australia around 1996, with the election of the conservative government of John Howard. Beginning in the pages of the Murdoch press and taken up by historians, politicians and the media (Dawson 2004; Macintyre and Clark 2003; Manne 2003; Windschuttle 2002, 2009), the history wars centred on revisionist accounts of settlement history, especially those which brought to light massacres of Indigenous peoples by settlers. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Keith Windschuttle, one of the keenest of the history warriors, denied the extent of mass killings of Indigenous people by white settlers in the process of colonisation of Australia.

Looking into the world from somewhere else  219 The  Frontier Massacres map, whose research team includes some of the most active revisionist voices in the history wars debate, such as its leading historian, Professor Lyndall Ryan from the University of Newcastle, is a decisive rebuttal of Windschuttle and his fellow denialists’ position on the massacres. It is focused on making visible to the public the scientific rigor of its research methodology and the overwhelming size and nuance of the collected archival evidence that confirms that thousands of Aboriginal people of all ages were indeed systematically killed by British colonists, settlers, pastoralists and state agents in the sampled period. What this chapter interrogates in the Frontier Massacres map project is not the authenticity of the historical evidence it presents, nor the appropriateness of the methods used in its historical research and interpretation. Rather, the chapter’s focus is on the largely unproblematised use of virtual globe technology as a means visually to represent the outcomes of the team’s historical research, which precedes and is independent from the online visual technology used for its public display. The website does include a disclaimer regarding its use of the online map technology for the purpose of visualising the project’s historical data on massacres. It provides this in the section “Representations,” which includes two paragraphs which explain that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represent massacres and create maps in diverse ways. By way of example, it names The Aboriginal Memorial and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s large canvas of 1977 Warlugulong, both located at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. However, unlike these alternative representations, the website limits its own mapping to a display of the information on a conventional European map, offering the disclaimer that “[t]he focus of this site is on mapping massacres with supporting historical evidence and making this publicly available” (Frontier Massacres). Implicit in this disclaimer is the naturalisation of European mapping as the superior method of public representation of the past, along with a failure to reflect on the potential of favouring Indigenous representational forms in public displays of Aboriginal histories.

Eurocentrism and the colonial erasure of the colonised The homogenising cultural logic deployed in the colonial mapping apparatus, a rationale that Ella Shohat and Robert Stam refer to as “Eurocentrism” (1994), and by virtue of which the material destruction of the bodies and homes of the forcefully colonised is extended into the erasure of their names, memories, languages and cultures, can be observed not only in European imperialist histories of bygone centuries. It can also be identified in its persistent continuation in modern neocolonial contexts through the imposition of racialized optical regimes that, through diverse technologies and techniques of mapping, are able to control, adjust and regulate the visual field by virtue of an economy of erasures and substitutions. Eurocentrism, according to Shohat and Stam, ‘is the procrustean forcing of cultural

220  Antonio Traverso heterogeneity into a single paradigmatic perspective [which] is naturalized as “common sense”’ (1994, 1–2, emphasis in the original). They add: “Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. It maps the world in a cartography that centralizes and augments Europe” (1994, 2).3 Illustrations of the incidence of Eurocentric imperialist erasure of the colonised can indeed be found in accounts emerging from diverse sociohistorical contexts, such as the colonisation of Palestine by the State of Israel, an event that must be understood in this sense as the establishment of a Euro-American geopolitical enclave in the Middle East than a conflict between two equal states. This colonial logic of erasure is, for example, narratively and poetically decolonised in one scene of the fiction film Inch’allah (dir. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Canada/France, 2012). An elderly Palestinian woman, her daughter and two sons, who live in a refugee camp in Ramallah, take a road trip to the occupied territories to visit the place where the woman’s village and house once lay. They get lost and the eldest son, who is driving, exclaims in frustration: “I don’t understand this map, all the names are in Hebrew!” (Barbeau-Lavalette 2012). Later, they continue on foot and the woman intuitively finds the wreck of her former house, now merely a stone foundation on barren ground. She then tells her children where each of the rooms used to be. Similarly, the documentary 1948 Nakba Commemoration: Creation and Catastrophe (dir. Andy Trimlett and co-dir. Ahlam Muhtaseb, USA, 2017) opens with a close up of an elderly Palestinian man in the back of a moving car. The man shouts: “Over here! Over here.” A voice-over narration ensues: “There are no signs for them. You won’t see them on tourist maps.” The next shot shows the man walking on a dirt path surrounded by dry bushes and prickly pear cacti. The narration continues: “But if you know where to look, if you remember where to look, you can find them, and hundreds like them across Israel.” Looking off screen, the Palestinian man exclaims: “They destroyed it all. It is all gone.” The reverse shot reveals a pile of stones partly covered with dense vegetation. The man bellows: “This is our house here! One hundred percent. Here is our home” (Trimlett and Muhtaseb 2017). As Edward Said claims, “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them” (1994, xiii). Empires’ hegemony over narration is constituted as much by the management of visualisation as by linguistic and literary enunciation. Following the destruction of the bodies and homes of the colonised, and the ensuing displacement of survivors, empire imposes itself through a “racialized regime of visuality” that “materialises the discursive relations of power that effectively constitute, regulate and determine what it is we see” (Pugliese 2006). However, as gestured in the above examples, in the absence of road signs and maps that might show the names of the past, the hegemonic visual regime can nevertheless be subverted by the personal and collective memories of the colonised and displaced. They follow the

Looking into the world from somewhere else  221 urge of intuition and the force of the sensorium to trace the land surface through back roads and dirt paths in order to unearth the surviving remnants of past, obliterated lives. In the above films, the colonial map, which covers over, erases and renames the traces of a millennial past, imposing a grid of emptiness and silence over the countless atrocities, massacres and terrorisms of a virulent colonial program of engineered ethnic cleansing and land dispossession, is sabotaged by the sensuous avatars of memory, of people’s intuitive peregrinations and amorous reclamations of rubble and dirt. Through these quiet, anonymous repossessions of the broken, scattered remnants of wrecked homes, residues of past life surviving disaster are converted into meaningful material traces through the acts of symbolic excavation depicted in these films. The wrecks of past lives produced by colonial and state violence are re-signified by people’s affective memory acts—beholding, walking through, touching, smelling, remembering, imagining, speaking about (Traverso 2019), thus coming to constitute “ruins”, which, according to Diana Taylor, are meaningful material conduits of past experience that become embodied in the experience of the present (Taylor 2009). Found among the most human meaning-producing undertakings, these simple gestures reverse the artificial erasures that the colonial mapping apparatus imposes. Likewise, Deathscapes’ architecture and visual aesthetics invite the user to procedures of decolonising excavation of painful memories and experiences that have been systematically erased or covered over by the ocularcentric colonial map. This is indeed the way the user comes to engage with the website from the start, as they are presented with a visually relational surface through which several horizontal bands slowly move, some to the right, some to the left, like film strips, displaying series of aleatory visual frames representing various aspects of the website’s contents. Here the site deploys techniques of meta-visuality that reflexively subvert the naturalised use of the screen as a mere transparent window frame; for example, the case studies’ layered visual fields and strata of multiplicities refuse and disrupt a hegemonic ocularcentric viewpoint. As we move to the next level by clicking on one of the options in the main page, we encounter an array of still images, text, audio and video, which we can navigate at a surface level or explore more deeply by subsequently clicking on the many hyperlinks that take us either to more nuanced treatments of the selected icon within the website or relevant external web sources. In this way, undisclosed in the colonial map, dispersed fragments of experiences of suffering, death, resilience and survival, are transformed into expressive structures of knowledge and meaning that, having been obliterated by colonial violence in the mainstream, are here decolonised, mapped, reassembled and recovered through remembrance, dialogue and reflection. Conversely, through the objectifying visual instruments of colonial history—maps, photographs, landscapes—the nuanced trajectories and experiences of actual people are erased, rendered invisible, the names and embodied memories of colonised individuals, of their families and

222  Antonio Traverso communities, are often lost to the primacy of statistics and graphic patterns. Thus, the Frontier Massacres project’s use of an ocularcentric mapping platform works toward spatialising and therefore fixing historical temporality, rendering it an always available imaginary present-past. As a technology of visualisation the Frontier Massacres map seeks to produce a total knowledge of colonial massacres in Australia through its controlling disembodied gaze, which relies on the quantification and abstract arrangement of data relating to dead Black bodies. While the objectifying functionality of this technology undoubtedly contributes to the evidentiary weight and facticity produced by the program of professional history, especially as the latter has been pressured in Australia by pseudo-scientific ideological efforts at falsifying such evidence, one of the unfortunate corollaries of this scientific program is the endorsement of the Eurocentric colonial scheme of erasure of Indigenous faces, voices, names and meanings.

Saying their names Writing in the context of the military invasion of Iraq by a USA-led coalition in 2003, Joseph Pugliese reflects on “the violent asymmetries that operate in the differential valuation of human lives” whereby while the 9/11 New York dead will be individuated at Ground Zero through the inscription of all their names on a memorial wall, the Iraqi civilian dead are dispatched [as] anonymous numerals [to] Iraq Body Count, [an online database] that maintains a daily record of the civilian casualties that have resulted from the continuing war in Iraq. (Pugliese 2006, para. 12) In the Australian context, the process of quantification and abstracting of bodies favoured by the regime of visualisation at work in the mapping technology of the Frontier Massacres website responds to a similar objectifying logic by virtue of which “flesh and blood bodies are decorporealised into […] digits” (Pugliese 2006, para. 12). Pugliese’s pertinent question about the anonymous civilian dead in the war in Iraq also applies to the anonymous Aboriginal dead in the Australian colonial massacres: “Who inhabits this macabre space marked by the suspensive hiatus of the dead and the undead?” (Pugliese 2006, para. 13). The same visual logic of empire is largely applied in official and public accounts of Aboriginal deaths in custody, whereby body counts often substitute for the faces, names and biographical and social circumstances of the victims.4 This procedure of substitution is unlike the commemorative visual practices observed in the Australian mainstream media for fatal victims of disasters or war casualties who are racially marked as white.5 In contrast, the political act of naming the Indigenous victims of colonial and neo-colonial violence and the attendant process of erasure of meaning

Looking into the world from somewhere else  223 and memory involved in the project of empire is highlighted in Deathscapes in a section precisely entitled “Saying their names”: On the Deathscapes site all names are used subject to the protocols established by families of the dead, especially in the case of Indigenous families, in the course of their search for justice. Removing the names of those who have died in state custody is not a neutral act: on the contrary, it is yet another politically loaded action that risks reducing the victims of state violence to disembodied and anonymous statistics. Unless we name and identify those who have died at the custodial hands of the state and its contracted non-state actors (G4S, Transfield etc), we risk reproducing the very forms of state redaction and censorship that the state itself deploys in order to occlude and efface those who have died through the exercise of state violence. In this spirit, a number of activist groups have established what they have termed as specifically ‘naming the dead’ projects in order to counter the state’s desire to render its victims as both generic and anonymous. (Deathscapes “Note on Aesthetics”; see also Chapter 5 in this volume) The individual visualisation of the Aboriginal persons who have died in custody in Australia is the aim of “naming the dead” activist campaigns, such as the projection of names of Aboriginal deaths in custody victims performed in Walyalup in Whadjuk Noongar land (Fremantle, Western Australia), in June 2020 in the context of the Black Lives Matter public protest movement following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer on a street of Minneapolis (see Figure Part I.1, this volume). The said Aboriginal deaths-in-custody names projection is depicted in the short video documentary Ngulluk Wongie Balluk-Kwell/We Will Say Their Names! (in progress), which partly states: On the 12th of June 2020, in solidarity with the BLM marches across Australia, names of some of the 437 Aboriginal people who have died in police custody were projected on the Rainbow sculpture, a local monument by artist Marcus Canning. The sculpture sits at Number 1 Canning Highway, overlooking the Derbal Yerrigan (Swan River) in Walyalup (port of Fremantle, Western Australia). The site of these video projections, between the river and the sea, overlooking the port of Fremantle and in the distance Wadjemup (Rottnest Island, the largest deaths in custody site in Australia), is one that carries layers of historical significance. […] The projections bring this site and its effaced layers of violence into focus anew.6 Unlike the above examples, in its objectifying urge to prove the historical occurrence of colonial massacres of Aboriginal people against orchestrated white nationalist denials, what the Frontier Massacres map effectively

224  Antonio Traverso achieves is to turn the Aboriginal dead into statistics. Whilst acknowledging the difficulties, and in many cases impossibility, of learning details about the individual victims, such as names or family and community lines, of Australian colonial massacres from the available historical archive, in certain cases efforts have been made to commemorate the Aboriginal victims of colonial massacres in terms of affect, memory and cultural meaning besides body counts, through decolonising methodologies such as oral history and creative practice. Examples of the latter include the artwork produced for the National Museum of Australia (NMA), Canberra, as well as Vincent Serico’s canvasses Myall Creek Massacre (2003) and Carnarvon Collision (Big Map) (2006). In addition, the NMA’s permanent exhibition entitled ‘Defining Moments in Australian History’ includes a section dedicated to the Myall Creek massacre of June 1838, in which a defenceless community of Wirrayaraay people of the Gamilaraay nation met a violent end at the hands of a group of convicts and ex-convicts in the region known today as New South Wales. The section explains that this is only one of many massacres carried out by white colonialists as part of the “frontier violence” that characterised the process of colonial settlement in Australia, but that the Myall Creek massacre is significant because it is the first that resulted in the trial and hanging of perpetrators. The NMA’s description of this case as setting “a judicial precedent” is emphasised through a quotation of Uncle Lyall Munro, a Gamilaraay Elder, who stated in 2013 that this court trial was “the first place white man’s justice done some good” (National Museum of Australia).7 Another significant element of the NMA’s display about the Myall Creek massacre is the level of detail that is provided, which, to a degree, serves to personalise some of the victims. For example, it states that “[s]ome of the names that the stockmen gave the Wirrayaraay people have survived in the court depositions: Old Joey, King Sandy, Sandy, Martha, Charley, Heppita, Tommy, and Daddy” (National Museum of Australia). As a further example, Pugliese’s analysis of Indigenous Canadian visual artist Adrian Stimson’s drone-based video installation As Above So Below, created on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Appin Massacre (Appin region, New South Wales, Australia), provides an insight into the layered regimes of visuality that were enabled by an imaging technology, the drone, usually associated with its own contemporary military massacres […] In the absence of the bodies that originally inscribed the bloody sites of two colonial massacres, Stimson mobilises morethan-human testimonies to give voice to the disappeared dead and to re-inscribe the colonial past into the colonial present. (Pugliese 2019, 457; also see Chapter 11, this volume) The above examples, as well as those mentioned earlier, namely, The Aboriginal Memorial and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong (1977), both held at the National Gallery of Australia, actively subvert the economy of scientific facticity governing the Frontier Massacres map.

Looking into the world from somewhere else  225

Ocularcentrism, war and modern technologies of visualisation The critique of ocularcentrism implies an attack neither on all subjective and social visual experience nor all visual technology. Rather, it involves the interrogation of the hegemonic visual regime in western culture, thought and science since antiquity. Indeed, the western philosophical tradition conceptualised rather early the human being not as another entity situated within and in interaction with the surrounding natural world but as a thinking nucleus facing and viewing it. The historian of philosophy Karl Jaspers tells us that this paradigm is already found established in the surviving fragments of pre- Socratic philosophical texts, emphasising the awareness ancient philosophers possessed about the potential of a thinking substance that was imagined precisely as a mastering metaphysical vision that seeks to transcend “sense perception and concrete observation” and replace it with a thinking “that looks into the world from somewhere else” (Jaspers 1966). As documented by Martin Jay, David Levin and others (Jay 1993; Levin 1993, 1988), ocularcentrism, western culture’s hegemonic regime of visuality, which permeates every other aspect of social and cultural life as it disavows difference and multiplicity with its homogenous luminosity and distancing monocular gaze, was systematically attacked and conceptually dismantled in many areas of philosophy and critical theory throughout the twentieth century. However, its power continues active in mainstream visual culture, especially given the ascendance of positivist, rationalist and instrumental scientific and technological models in today’s globalised societies. In as much as modern socio- economic life relies upon military-industrial complexes, ocularcentrism remains deeply implicated in the maintenance and expansion of colonial legacies of cultural and social biopower that sustain reified unequal social structures, especially through the normalisation of optical paradigms of domination articulated through increasingly sophisticated “vision machines,” that is, systems of discourse, techniques and instruments used to colonise the world visually. Paul Virilio claims in War and Cinema that the coalescence of developments of tools of “observation and destruction” defines western modernity (1989, 68). Significantly, in his analysis Virilio stresses the atemporal character of the ocularcentric formation when he states in The Vision Machine that “omnivoyance” is western culture’s totalitarian ambition, whose absolutist aim is to produce a “whole image” of the world, which paradoxically can only be achieved by virtue of “repressing the invisible” (Virilio 1994, 33). The Frontier Massacres project’s uncritical adoption of virtual globe technology and representation ideologically aligns its map, apparently devised to advance a program of cultural decolonisation, with a colonial optical regime. Indeed, the God’s Eye world imago inscribed in the satellite map has served as the foundation of myriad technologies of imperialist power, from European colonial maps to contemporary military satellite-based

226  Antonio Traverso machinery of surveillance and attack. Not surprisingly, in his analysis Virilio places a great deal of critical interest in the “dominant role of aerial observation” (1989, 70). In the contemporary world, the militarised surveillance gaze from above renders, according to Virilio, a vision characterised by “ubiquitousness,” namely, a total vision that is both “simultaneous [and] global” (1989, 71) and that it projects “a final image of the world” (Virilio 1989, 73, emphasis in the original). Virilio’s interpretation of the technological zeal for complete visual surveillance conceives it as the culmination of the west’s omnivoyant, ocularcentric project. In Virilio’s words: “the artificial image produced by satellites as they endlessly sweep over the surface of continents drawing automatic maps [is a] subliminal light of incomparable transparency, where technology finally exposes the whole world” (Virilio 1989, 88). The Frontier Massacres map’s embrace of virtual globe technology, in its urge to bring objective visibility to the location of collective killings of Aboriginal people at the hands of colonial settlers in the modern map of Australia, contributes to reinforce the omnivoyant nature of the gaze from above by virtue of which, as Virilio claims, the war machine and the viewing machine converge to produce the West’s idealised technological ocularcentric gaze, which imagines itself capable of beholding simultaneously the whole world.

Assertoric and aletheic vision Conversely, Deathscapes proposes an open, relational, non-ocularcentric visual regime for its mapping of racialized violence in which vision is not only decentralised through multiple layers of images, fragments of text and links to video and audio but also exposed to meticulous contact with the full sensorium through diverse critical content and affective form. The opposition between the ocularcentric colonial gaze that controls from above and what can be referred to as an open or relational vision has long been addressed in phenomenological philosophy and critical studies of visuality. For example, extending Martin Heidegger’s reflection about a postmetaphysical vision, Levin distinguishes between two antithetical modes of vision (1988, 440). One mode, which Levin calls “assertoric,” is based on the metaphysics of presence and responds to the closed truth of the assertion. The second mode of vision, which Levin calls “aletheic,” responds to the open truth of critical interpretation and ethical engagement. For Levin, the emergence of a non-metaphysical concept of vision is ethically founded on a paradigm of responsibility and care for human difference. While assertoric vision can be depicted as a straight vector that runs from the subject of vision to the viewed or desired object, aletheic vision can be figured as a web of relations. In this mode of vision, a circumspect observer possesses an awareness of their limitations within a visible, sensible world that is always more expansive and more expressive than the subject’s own visual field and perceptive capacity (Levin 1988, 435).

Looking into the world from somewhere else  227 Evidence of these antithetical visual modes is found constantly as we engage with the formal and material plurality of Deathscapes, whereby its underlying aesthetics and architecture as a decolonising map of racialized violence is conceived in terms of an open, relational regime of vision, which is sustained precisely by a web of ethical, political, critical and affective relations, while being constantly punctuated by the appearance within its midst of the colonial gaze of power. This is visible, for example, within the Australian case study on the violent 2014 death in custody of Ms Dhu, a 22 year-old woman of the Yamatji-Nanda Nation and the Banjima People […] taken into custody at the South Hedland police lock-up under a warrant of commitment for unpaid fines. She died within 44 hours of entering into the custody of Western Australian police. (Bui et al. 2017; also see Chapter 5, this volume) Within the digital online space devoted to this case, the user is able to engage with fragments of text that vary from expository to testimonial and poetic modes of address; still photographs of Ms Dhu’s relatives and public demonstrations and commemorations; visual artworks; and short videos within the website and links to external videos, including television reports made by Australian broadcasters (see Figure 1.1 Chapter 1, in this volume). In one of the videos, a Noongar singer, Della Rae Morrison, is shown singing outside the Perth’s Magistrates Court during the inquest. The amateur video constructs a relational visual field, as shot by Michelle Bui of the Deathscapes team, from the perspective of a member of the crowd witnessing the deeply moving performance; at one point the camera pans to the right and briefly reveals the faces of a few young people solemnly listening to the song. When it returns to frame the singer, we see a male, armed guard who has positioned himself directly behind the young woman and is casting his controlling gaze straight into the frame of the lens, thus creating a clash of visual modes. A similar arrangement is seen later within this case study in a photograph of Ms Dhu’s grandmother, Aunty Carol Roe, who is marching the streets of Perth holding placards demanding justice for her granddaughter’s killing by police, while immediately behind her, a mounted police officer is framing her in his gaze from above (Bui et al. 2017).

Western cartography: Mapping as technology of colonialism The western world’s historical reliance on ocularcentric tropes and devices is particularly evident in the function of the technology of cartography as a visual tool of colonisation in the age of European expansion, when maps were developed not only to promote and guide expeditions, but to assert

228  Antonio Traverso colonial control over the occupied territories (Probasco 2014). Far from neutral depictions of geography, nineteenth-century maps were active components of colonial discourse, contributing to empire building by facilitating and legitimating European colonial power (Bassett 1994, 316). The principle that sustains the western map, envisioned as an abstract geometrical projection of landmarks on to an imaginary canvas above the earth’s surface, is a metaphysical aerial vision conceived as a monocular gaze of god. The map, understood in its modern sense in western culture, is inherently a colonial technology whose function is to produce a complete visual representation of the empire.8 Umberto Eco satirises the absolutist idealism of the western cartographic imaginary in a humorous yet logical discussion of “the theoretical possibility of […] a Map of the Empire, which perfectly coincided with the Empire itself” (1994, 95, emphasis in the original). Eco demonstrates not only the theoretical impossibility of such an enterprise but shows that imperialist mapping is mobilised by a desire for absolute identity between the map and the mapped. As pointed out, the Frontier Massacres map tends to quantify, spatialise and fix historical temporality as it seeks to produce a complete objective knowledge of colonial massacres in Australia. Human geography and environmental science applications of the virtual globe technology may appear as apt renditions of quantifiable data applicable to benign humanitarian aims, for example, anticipation of natural disasters in often-affected areas. The complex human meaning of massacres, on the other hand, is catastrophically reduced when treated as objective data that can be represented on a map. Massacres, like genocides, cannot be mapped without incurring in deep logical and ethical transgressions. As they are apprehended in an epistemological void of half voices and half silences, of erasures, simulations and substitutions, of fragmented, half repressed recollections of suffering and viscous layers of forgetting, like old homes’ broken stones irretrievably claimed by time and wilderness, massacres require sustained, agonistic immersion to be approached. Like the ruins of Palestinian homes, as in the films discussed above, histories and memories of massacres might be walked through, touched, felt, spoken about, approximated yet never fully encountered or completely known, let alone discernible to a distant gaze or open to absolute geometrical mapping from above. The objectifying gaze of the aerial map and the virtual globe, which the Frontier Massacres map problematically applies to the representation of Aboriginal massacres, is actively repudiated in Deathscapes’ agonistic immersion into the horror and incommensurable pain of Aboriginal people and asylum seekers inflicted on their incarcerated bodies by the police, medical, legal and government institutions of Australia. An ethical visual engagement is compellingly illustrated in the section of Deathscapes entitled ‘The CCTV Footage: What the Law Sees’ in the case study ‘At a

Looking into the world from somewhere else  229 Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms Dho (Australia)’, where Perera and Pugliese write: What does the law see? On a silent monitor, the impact of flesh and bone on concrete; the reflexive movement of recoil of a young woman’s broken frame as it is “grabbed,” then falls backwards. Is there a small twitch in the arm that grabs, then “loses grip”? No moans, cries or curses to be heard, but a slight turn of heads to the reverberation of skull on floor, a reverberation that seems to run through a current on the screen to a shudder in our own bodies? (Perera and Pugliese 2017) The rejection of the colonial gaze, represented in this case by a form of the techno-military visual paradigm of surveillance that fixes, controls and erases undesirable objects from its visual field, is therefore performed in Deathscapes by virtue of an “aletheic” (Levin 1988), that is, open, relational, vision that engages all the senses, thus encouraging deep reflection, critical excavation of meaning and ethical responses.

Figure 12.1 Invasion Day Floral and Photo Memorial, Naarm [Melbourne] 2019. Photo by Charandev Singh.

230  Antonio Traverso

Postphenomenology and the decolonisation of technology A counter argument often put to critiques of humanitarian adaptations of technology originally conceived for domination, such as the Frontier Massacres website’s use of the satellite map, posits that the criticism is unfair precisely because technology that has been designed for destructive purposes is now turned on its head and used constructively. This proposition, however, relies on an instrumental conception that defines technology as a means to an end according to which ethical and political valuations would apply only to the purpose of the use of technology, not to the technological apparatus itself, which is otherwise conceived as neutral. A decolonising approach, on the contrary, critically seeks to dismantle the myth of the neutrality of instruments, techniques and methodologies rather inquiring into the form of their implication in the machinery of imperialist and colonial domination. In reference to an insight of Audre Lorde’s, Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes: “The master’s tools of colonization will not work to decolonize what the master built. Our challenge is to fashion new tools for the purpose of decolonizing and Indigenous tools that can revitalize Indigenous knowledge” (Smith 2021). Complementary with the project of decoloniality (Mignolo 2011; Smith 1999), a contemporary critical approach, inspired in Heidegger’s critique of the notion of technology “as something neutral” (1977/1954, 4) is the postphenomenological theory of technology of Don Ihde, which is founded on “an inter-relational, coconstitutive ontology” (Ihde 2012, 369).9 Thus, for Ihde technology is never neutral, there is no “equipment without its belonging to some set of culturally constituted values and processes” (Ihde 1990, 126). To illustrate this point, he explains that early South Pacific navigators, who used to steer by observing wave patterns, later received and adopted the use of the compass from western visitors: “once it had been adopted and used for one of its purposes—to steer a straight course—it became possible to unlearn (de-skill) the more difficult wave perceptions, which were part of a complex initiation process in seamanship” (Ihde 1990, 126). The loss of deep knowledge by colonised populations is itself a memory that has been erased from official histories and so among the aims of all decolonising methodologies are to render this loss visible, recover the surviving remnants of lost Indigenous knowledge, re-learn the methods by which Indigenous peoples produce knowledge and apply it to the creation of new knowledge today (Smith 1999/2021). Postphenomenology’s critical understanding of technology shows how seemingly neutral techniques and instruments, such as maps and other tools and equipment of exploration, observation, measurement and management of natural or social resources, are on the contrary semantically and ideologically charged components of larger technological apparatuses, themselves subservient to hegemonic designs, such as the expansive Eurocentric colonial project. Consequently, postphenomenology of

Looking into the world from somewhere else  231 technology is also applicable to historical study as a decolonising methodology and, in the context of this chapter’s discussion, it encourages the understanding of such colonial events as mass killings and the forced displacement and relocation of populations not as dispersed or capricious bouts of violence but as structural constituents of a colonial technology of settlement. Massacres conducted by state apparatuses or forces of occupation are by definition acts of genocide. The episteme informing colonial massacres is therefore always linked to economies of ethnic cleansing; like bush logging, they are a technique of land clearing for settlement on newly possessed territories. Colonial massacres of Indigenous people in Australia are intrinsic components of the settlement technology and must therefore be understood as constitutive of a complex colonial technology of settlement that functions through progressive cycles of territorial, social and cultural occupation, dispossession, cleansing and erasure, where massacres are systematically continuous with other techniques, methods and tools, such as maps, weapons and transportation and observation instruments. In this regard, it is useful to consider Virilio’s signaling towards a nonocularcentric understanding of vision as a temporal domain. In his words, our capacity to apprehend the world visually “starts in the past in order to illuminate […] our present environment, itself comes from a distant visual memory without which there would be no act of looking” (Virilio 1994, 62). One of the critical implications of the temporalisation of the visual is the disclosure of the intimate imbrication between old and new tools and techniques of seeing. This idea is especially true in the case of the colonial apparatus of observation and mapping that persists in contemporary drones, geo-mapping and virtual globes. The technological conflation of vision and history is exercised in the minimalist historical drama White on White (Blanco en blanco, dir. Théo Court, Spain/Chile, 2019), which circumnavigates the genocidal massacre of the Selk’nam people, millennial inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, southern Chile and Argentina, at the hands of white pastoralists in the late nineteenth century. Court’s film decolonises official history, which has overall denied this genocidal event, by re-inscribing the images of colonial atrocity. Yet rather than attempting to represent graphically the massacres of defenceless and unsuspecting Indigenous tribes at the hands of well-equipped western head hunters, Court’s film approximates the epistemological void of the historical massacre through the lens of an early photographer, who is seen taking carefully staged shots immediately after the killings, directing the white hunters to aim their rifles into the distance and rest their boots over the dead Indigenous bodies scattered around. The film encourages its viewer to see, so to speak, the massacre of the Selk’nam in the present, by implicating the optical apparatus of photography itself in the genocide and, by extension, implicating the viewer as the film’s final staged shot is modelled on an actual archival photograph. Locked within the camera’s frame, which coincides with the

232  Antonio Traverso cinematic screen, we are forced to observe and hear the photographer, who repeatedly runs from behind the camera back into the scene to compose its deadly tableau of bodies, but never quite taking the shot.

Critical cartography and Indigenous cosmological knowledges The analysis of historical films that self-consciously interrogate the implication of the western visual apparatus in colonial massacres makes it pertinent at this point to contrast the Frontier Massacres map with what is referred to as Indigenous cartographic knowledge. According to David Turnbull, known for his work on Aboriginal relational mapmaking practice, as “[t]he colonial and the enlightenment projects were in large part concerned with the establishment of boundaries to determine and delimit sovereignty over territory, and authority over knowledge,” the result was the active erasure of the unbounded character of Aboriginal society (2005, 761). Turnbull makes a clear distinction between Aboriginal and western forms of mapping. Where the western map’s main purpose is the exact aerial demarcation of fixed territorial borders, in Aboriginal culture “[b]oundaries are more properly the subject of negotiation and exchange in ceremony, ritual, and protocol” (Turnbull 2008, 2687). In Turnbull’s words: while Australian Aboriginal groups constantly map their land, this is a very different process from that of the dominant white society. […] Aboriginal relationships with country do not equate with the notions of boundary precision, exclusion, and individual property rights and the linkages to the state implicit in Western maps. Aboriginal maps keep those relationships alive by celebrating and performing connections between people and land in stories, ceremony, and painting. (Turnbull 2008, 2687) Warwick Thornton’s documentary We Don’t Need a Map (2008) uncompromisingly challenges the idea of western mapping as a purportedly necessary terrain for engagements with Indigenous knowledge. To this effect, Thornton’s film satirises the ruthless and contrived British occupation and mapping of the land, offering instead a nuanced, at times ceremonial witnessing of the social and cultural significance of Indigenous astronomical knowledge as a way of accessing the cultural understanding of the land. It achieves its deep observation and listening by travelling around Australia to talk directly with Aboriginal Elders and Custodians on Yolngu, Wardaman and Warlpiri country about their communities’ stories and knowledge of the stars, in particular the constellations known in English as the Milky Way and the Southern Cross. Even though Thornton, in a paradoxical contrast with the title of his film, includes an aerial map of

Looking into the world from somewhere else  233 Australia to depict his wonderings from location to location (a standard device of visual narration in the travelling documentary sub-genre), he self-consciously intervenes in the map by giving it the appearance of a dark blue drawing of Australia, in which the land, the sea and the starry sky are superimposed, and simultaneously inverting the map of Australia as a bottom-up map. In an ironic reminiscence of geo-map technology, the film zooms in to each new location from this layered pictorial map to continue with the director’s visits. Yet, more than anything else in a film described as a “reflexive and deeply collaborative … artifact of relationship and encounter” (Potts 2018, 165), it is Thornton’s performative, horizontal documentary approach that counters the ocularcentric view from above, for example, by addressing questions at some of his subjects as he looks at them through the viewfinder of his own film camera, while being himself shot by a second camera. This relational, interpersonal approach is significant as it echoes the film’s theme, namely, the relationship between Indigenous astronomical knowledge and Indigenous mapping of the land, which progressively discloses a millennial worldview that is antithetical to the gaze from above through which western culture generates knowledge. The significance of an Aboriginal relational concept of mapping as a distinctive type of cultural technology that works through connections of sky, land and people emerges in the conversations about the stars that Thornton’s has with Indigenous Elders. One of his interlocutors, Bill Harney, a Wardaman Elder from Katherine, declares: “Inside that Milky Way all these stars are related to all the trees, all the different birds, all the animals” (Thornton 2017). He tells Thornton: when the trade times come, that’s the time when everybody come together to make up this big songline. […] Didn’t walk around, just sit in one place but you can recognise all those different hills and waterholes, and everything in your mind, you just call out the name. Thornton exclaims: “It’s like a singing map, hey.” Bill Harney answers: “Yes, singing map.” Thornton adds: “You don’t need map cause the map is the song.” Bill Harney replies: “Yeah, we don’t need map.” Thornton insists: “The song is the map.” Bill Harney responds: “song’s the map that guides you into that place.” Thornton remarks: “Because they’ve listened to the map not looked at the map.” And Bill Harney concludes: The white man got to read a book about it. Oh, he’s over there. Gotta look at the map. He’s over there. But blackfella, he just in one spot and nail all those places everywhere. […] The song’s in the earth and in the sky. In the Milky Way, it will guide you. All the different stars, they will guide you. (Thornton 2017)

234  Antonio Traverso Rather than using the stars as geometrical vectors from where an aerial vision might be projected to map the land, the Aboriginal conception of mapping glimpsed in Thornton’s film’s tenuous translations of otherwise deep and mostly secret cultural knowledge seems to reveal an understanding of the land, the sea and the people as continuous with the starry sky and its multiple, richly symbolic meanings. Echoing the relational nature of Thornton’s film, particularly as it is perceived in the affinity between the expressions of Elders in the film and the research findings of Turnbull and others, Deathscapes emerges as an illustration of critical, decolonising mapping of histories of colonial and state violence. Through relational uses of digital, interactive online visual technology, the web project contributes to the task of tracing, resisting, interrogating and dismantling the ocularcentric power structures that contribute to physical and ideological racialized violence. As a decolonising mapping device that seeks to visualise obscured sites of extreme gendered and racialized violence, Deathscapes shows that the mechanics of this violence in Australia and other settler societies is far from fortuitous or anecdotal; rather, it is presented as structurally produced and historically inscribed. This point is driven home in one of the website’s case studies, namely, ‘Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State,’ which centres on racialized violence exerted by the settler state on the bodies of Indigenous women in Australia, Canada and the United States. The case study documents and comments on the spaces and contexts in which Indigenous women die outside the formal custody of the state: on the streets; on the open road; in their own homes or at the edges of communities. In these spaces, although outside of its carceral confines, the violence of the settler state is enacted through diverse practices that render Indigenous women’s lives unsafe and produce their deaths. (Allas et al. 2018) Visualised through a devastating accretion of records, testimonies, analysis and creative responses, the deaths of numerous Aboriginal women in various private and public spaces are presented as the consistent contemporary extension of hitherto more visible forms of racialized violence, from frontier massacres of Aboriginal groups and the rape of Aboriginal women by white settlers in the colonial period to systemic deaths of Aboriginal detainees whilst in police custody more recently. Reflecting the form of Indigenous mappings of cultural memory through the sky, the land and the people, the Deathscapes site’s relational, decolonising mapping is therefore not only a spatial but a temporal process of connecting the structure of violence in the colonial past as continuous with the conditions of violence in the neo-colonial present.

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Conversely, the map – and the act of mapping – from above, as exemplified in the University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1780 to 1930 online map, implies a detached, detemporalised, disembodied subject that strives for complete vision and knowledge. As this chapter has claimed, the uncritical use of virtual globe technologies for the purpose of representing colonial massacres is inherently problematic because colonial massacres of Indigenous people must be understood as techniques constitutive of a complex colonial technology of settlement, where massacres are continuous with other colonising tools, including maps and observation devices. In contrast, a relational, decolonising form of mapping, as revealed in Indigenous cultures, and as prefigured in the Deathscapes website, involves forms of vision and knowledge that are inherently temporalised, caring, dialogic and embodied.

Acknowledgements The author expresses his deepest gratitude to the book’s editors for their endless patience and encouragement during the extended drafting of this chapter, and for their insightful feedback on content and argument, crucial bibliographic suggestions and expert formal editing.

Notes 1 c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php; www.deathscapes.org 2 “Virtual globe” refers here to technologies of global virtual mapping and geolocation, involving satellite and aerial digital still images of Earth, and groundlevel photography and geo-specific virtual databases. Virtual globe technology was initially developed within the computer games industry in the USA in the early 2000s before being acquired by intelligence and defence agencies, and released to the public commercially soon after. 3 Eurocentrism refers not only to ‘Europe per se but also to the “neo-Europeans” of the Americas, Australia and elsewhere’ (Shohat and Stam 1994, 1, all emphasis in the original). 4 An important exception is The Guardian’s database ‘Deaths Inside Indigenous Australian Deaths in Custody’: www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ ng-interactive/2018/aug /28/deaths-inside-indigenous-australian-deathsin-custody 5 A key example is the case of 88 fatal Australian victims of the 2002 Bali bombings; see: The Australian online: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/balibombings-ten-years-on-australians-remember/news-story/ae53602cacd5163 44611312d59ec8512; also see: Crofts (2014). 6 Ngulluk Wongie Balluk-Kwell/We Will Say Their Names! (in progress), directed by Glen Stasiuk, written by Hannah McGlade and Suvendrini Perera, produced by Antonio Traverso and the Decolonising Media Lab with support from Curtin University’s School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. 7 NMA: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/myall-creekmassacre 8 See: Brealey (1995); Lucchesi (2019); Meier (2013); Stone (1988).

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9 The ‘post’ in Ihde’s postphenomenology signifies an adaptation of the core tenets of modern phenomenology. Postphenomenology encourages a critical and creative thinking aimed at working through and with technological apparatuses.

References Allas, Tess, Michelle Bui, Bronwyn Carlson, Pilar Kasat, Hannah McGlade, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2018. “Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State’. Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ indigenous-femicide-and-the-killing-state. Bassett, Thomas J. 1994. “Cartography and Empire Building in NineteenthCentury West Africa.” Geographical Review 84 (3) (July): 316–335. Brealey, Ken. 1995. “Mapping Them ‘Out’: Euro-Canadian Cartography and the Appropriation of the Nuxalk and Ts’ilhqot’in First Nations’ Territories, 1793– 1916.” Canadian Geographer 39 (2) (Summer): 140–156. Bui, Michelle, Dean Chan, Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, Ayman Qwaider and Charandev Singh. 2017. “At a Lethal Intersection: The Killing of Ms Dhu.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www. deathscapes.org/case-studies/ms-dhu. Crofts, Stephen J. 2014. “Australian Press Constructions of the 2002 Bali Bombing: Differing Imaginings of the Nation and its Place in the World.” PhD diss., The University of Queensland. https://tinyurl.com/dejypmv3 Dawson, John G. 2004. Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Sydney: Macleay Press. Eco, Umberto. 1994. “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1.” In How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, Translated by William Weaver, 95–106. New York & London: Harcourt Brace. Heidegger, Martin. 1977/1954. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Translated and with an Introduction by William Lovitt, 3–35. New York: Garland Pub. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Ihde, Don. 2012. “‘Cartesianism’ Redux or Situated Knowledges.” Foundations of Science 17: 369–372. doi 10.1007/s10699-011-9243-x Jaspers, Karl. 1966. The Great Philosophers 2. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century’s French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, David M., ed. 1993. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, David M. 1988. The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation. New York & London: Routledge. Lucchesi, Annita H. 2019. “Mapping Geographies of Canadian Colonial Occupation: Pathway Analysis of Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” Gender, Place & Culture 26 (6): 868–887. Macintyre, Stuart and Anna Clark. 2003. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Looking into the world from somewhere else  237 Manne, Robert, ed. 2003. Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne: Black Inc. Meier, Allison. 2013. “How Cartography Helped Make Colonial Empires.” https:// hyperallergic.com/94793/how-cartography-helped-make-colonial-empires/ Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perera, Suvendrini and Joseph Pugliese. 2017. “What the Law Saw: Repertoires of Violence and Regimes of Impunity.” Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States. https://www.deathscapes.org/case-studies/ms-dhu/ Potts, Rowena. 2018. “We Don't Need a Map [film review].” Visual Anthropology Review 34(2): 163–165. Probasco, Nate. 2014. “Cartography as a Tool of Colonization: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 Voyage to North America.” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2): 425–472. Pugliese, Joseph. 2006. “Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling and the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Context of the War in Iraq.” Borderlands E Journal 5 (1). Pugliese, Joseph. 2019. “As Above So Below: Drone Visualities of the Aftermath, Testimonies of the More-Than-Human and the Politico-Aesthetics of Massacre Sites.” Social Identities 25 (4): 457–475. Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London & New York: Routledge. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books; Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd ed. London & New York: Zed Books/Bloomsbury. www. google.com.au/books/edition/Decolonizing_Methodologies/87ssEAAAQBAJ? hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover Stone, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Imperialism, Colonialism and Cartography.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 13 (1): 57–64. Taylor, Diana. 2009. “Performing Ruins.” In Telling Ruins in Latin America, edited by Michael Lazzara and Vicky Unruh, 13–26. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Traverso, Antonio. 2019. “Excavating La Moneda: Cinematic Memory and Postdictatorship Documentary in Chile.” Social Identities 25 (4): 590–606. Turnbull, David. 2005. “Locating, Negotiating, and Crossing Boundaries: A Western Desert Land Claim, The Tordesillas Line, and the West Australian Border.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 757–770. Turnbull, David. 2008. “Maps and Mapmaking of the Australian Aboriginal People.” In Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, edited by Helaine Selin, 2685–2688. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Virilio, Paul. 1989. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London & New York: Verso. Virilio, Paul. 1994. The Vision Machine. London: BFI & Indiana University Press. Windschuttle, Keith. 2002. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History 1: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press. Windschuttle, Keith. 2009. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, 3: The Stolen Generations 1881–2008. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press.

238  Antonio Traverso Films cited 1948 Nakba Commemoration: Creation and Catastrophe (dir. Andy Trimlett & co-dir. Ahlam Muhtaseb, USA, 2017). Inch’allah (dir. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Canada/France, 2012). White on White ([Blanco en blanco] dir. Théo Court, Spain/Chile, 2019). We Don’t Need a Map (dir. Warwick Thornton, Australia, 2008).

13 Perpetual trauma Witnessing deathscapes of the colonial project Adrian Stimson

Canada for the longest time denied that it harmed Indigenous peoples, despite the fact that there was ample historical evidence along with the real intergenerational trauma that affects thousands still. The purpose of The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), which was established in 1991 and published in 1996, was to bring to light the issues of Indigenous status and rights. The RCAP report was five volumes, 4,000 pages long, with 440 recommendations, which called for drastic changes to the relationship between Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal people, and all levels of governments in Canada. The report gave a 20-year timeline; it is now 25 years later, and the majority of the recommendations have still not been implemented. This was followed by the Truth and Reconciliation commission in 2008, which documented the history and lasting impacts of the Indian Residential School system. This resulted in a formal apology from the Government of Canada, yet the settlement aspect omitted a large number of day school students who suffered similarly to the students taken to live in the schools. This was followed by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in September 2016. According to the 22 April 2016 background of the inquiry, between the years 1980 and 2012, Indigenous women and girls represented 16% of all female homicides in Canada whilst representing 4% of the population, a rate seven times higher (2019, 55). This inquiry concluded in 2019. Further, the Federal Indian Day school class action suit was settled in 2019 due to close in 2022. Finally, students who attended the Federal Indian Day schools could testify and apply for settlement monies. I speak of these commissions and reports to demonstrate that while Canada has acknowledged its genocidal past, very little has happened to tackle the systemic racism that exists at all levels of government and Canadian society. This lack of action translates into more traumatic experiences for the Indigenous population of Canada. It is a perpetual state of ignorance within the non-Indigenous population that then results in malice and racism that affects the daily lives of Indigenous peoples.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-22

240  Adrian Stimson I have lived on First Nations in Canada for the majority of my youth, and now as a 56-year-old adult I returned home to live on my First Nation Siksika. For many of us who live on their First Nation, trauma is a big part of our experience. For years Canada denied defining our experience as genocide, using softer terms like cultural genocide, like it only effected our culture. In fact, if I were to compare my experiences to that of a war zone, death is common. Death as a result of historical, inter-generational and daily lived trauma. For instance, if I look back at 2020–21, like many years before, my Nation lost over 100 members, a combination of the COVID-19 virus, disease, depression, suicide and overdoses, took many young and elder lives. I sometimes think about how much we love our elders. Statistically, many of us die before we get old, the ones we have we cherish. Siksika’s overall population is approximately 7,500 people so you can imagine the loss of 100 members effects everyone. This is not unusual; if I were to take a look back at every year past, we have had very high numbers of deaths each year, many of them young and tragic. I recall one year in the 1980s when I lost 20 members of my family to suicide, murder, addiction and accidents; it was one funeral after another, the entire year spent in mourning. What I am describing is a perpetual state of trauma: it’s like we can never catch our breaths, the adding of trauma upon trauma, upon trauma, gives no space for healing. I often wonder how any of us function at all. Yet we do, we are resilient, but this does not discount the damage that is done to our emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual selves. We are all somewhere on our journey of coming to understand our trauma and doing something about it. Healing on many levels is occurring. Once you become aware of your rights and understand that you have a voice, speaking to power becomes a tenet of living and healing. Political movements such as Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, anti-pipeline activists and artists, have been at the forefront of politically direct action, educating the public and speaking to the rights that we claim as Indigenous peoples—in fact, when it pertains to the environment, all our rights. I am a residential day school survivor; part of my healing journey is to embrace my trauma and understand the post-traumatic stress disorder that manifested in my being. To change my mind, to respond to the deeply distressing and disturbing events of residential school, to overcome the feelings of helplessness, the diminishing self, the inability to cope, to become more than just a survivor, to become someone who thrives in spite of a system that was built to destroy us. I have chosen art as my voice to decolonize, to challenge the colonial project on every artistic level, painting, performance, installation and sculpture.

Buffalo Boy: agent for change An overriding theme in my work is the icon of the bison. It has been estimated that there were 75 million bison pre-contact. I see the slaughter

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Figure 13.1 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

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Figure 13.2 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

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Figure 13.3 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

of the bison as analogous to the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. A lot of my research and work delves into this history and works to both understand and reconcile the colonial project. I use the bison as a symbol of resistance, of change and resilience. Every time I draw, paint, sculpt, photo or perform the bison, I am honouring one of those 75 million slaughtered. In essence, my use of the bison in my work takes me back to a time where they were an integral part of our cosmology. I want to keep that tradition alive, to have the bison be a part of my daily life and through its use in my art, become an agent of change for not only myself but for all who see and believe that a future can be built without a colonial mindset. Buffalo Boy is a performance art persona, a campy Two-Spirited Indian Cowboy based on Buffalo Bill and his wild west shows. Buffalo Boy, like Buffalo Bill, is a spectacle, the embodiment of the Wild West; settlers claiming the land, Indian wars, Manifest Destiny, resource extraction and the ultimate genocide of Indigenous peoples. I was also looking at my own Indian Cowboy history, my grandfather was an Indian Cowboy in the Calgary stampede. Humour plays a big role in Indigenous knowledge systems; it is a way to cope and a gentle way of getting hard issues heard. I see performance art as an extension of Indigenous story-telling, there were many

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Figure 13.4 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

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Figure 13.5 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

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Figure 13.6 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

characters within tribal groups that held stories, the trickster, coyote and clowns. Stories that lead to further understanding of the human and tribal condition. Some of Buffalo Boy’s stories can be found in his performances, Buffalo Boy’s Blackout Bingo, BB’s Colonial Cabaret, You-Can Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd, Why Not?, Battle of Little Big Horny, Dance for Old Sun, The Two Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Buffalo Boy’s First Peep Holes, The American Dream: Manifest Destiny Revisited, Do Not Feel the Buffalo- Moving Camp, Confessional Indulgence, Buffalo Boy’s Shaman Exterminator – The Red Man, Gambling the Prairie Winnings, Buffalo Boy’s Heart On, Buffalo Boy Loves Burning Man, Wilder West, Getting It from 4 Directions, Braid Less and Buffalo Boy’s Wild West Peep Show (Figures 13.1–13.7).

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Figure 13.7 Adrian Stimson. Buffalo Boy.

Sick and Tired: the duality of life and death Sick and Tired is an installation that explores identity, history and transcendence and through the reconfiguration of architectural and natural fragments it exposes colonial history (Figure 13.8). The installation is made

248  Adrian Stimson

Figure 13.8 Adrian Stimson. Sick and Tired.

up of three Old Sun Residential School windows, filled with feathers and back lit, and an old infirmary bed from the same school with a bison robe folded into a human shape placed on its springs. The bed is illuminated from the top to create a shadow beneath similar to a stretched hide. Old Sun or Natusapi was a chief of the Blackfoot and a grandfather. He distrusted the newcomers greatly, he did not want to sign Treaty 7, preferring war to what at the time he considered the end of our way of life. The Blackfoot Reserve #149, today called the Siksika Nation, was divided in half for conversion, the east given to the Catholics and the west given to the Anglicans. My family camped on the west-end of the reserve that by happenstance was claimed by the Anglicans. The school that was built was named Chief Old Sun Residential School; I find it ironic that his namesake was used as it ensured the end of a way of life for many of his descendants: my family members. The institution now called Old Sun College has made the transition from residential school to college, yet it remains a colonizing symbol for many on my Nation. Over the years, various renovations have created fragments of material culture; I have been privileged to collect many of these fragments. Residential schools were instruments of genocide; they created isolation, disorientation, pain and death and ultimately broke many human spirits. I can imagine many children peering out of these windows, longing to be home with their families. Their reality, however, was confinement similar to being smothered by a pillow. Sickness and disease were, and still are, a reality for First Nations—a legacy of illness represented by the infirmary bed. How many people lay sick, tired, dying or dead on this bed is not

Perpetual trauma  249 known, yet I feel the heaviness of its history, a feeling that affects me physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. The bison robe configured like a shrouded human form lies on the bedsprings; it is a cultural reference that speaks to another fragment, that of the historically slaughtered Bison, which I see as analogous to my people the Blackfoot and our culture. A light shines down illuminating robe and bed; the shadow beneath represents a stretched hide and speaks to the duality of life and death. Shadows also speak to the unknown or mysterious. I believe that objects hold energy; the combination of elements—windows, feathers, light, shadow, bed and bison robe speak to history, culture, genocide, absence, presence and fragmentation. Together they form a space in which to contemplate the legacy of colonialism and how that legacy continues in the present. In reflecting, we can examine our-selves and our relationship to the past, present and future. For me, creating this installation has been a way to exorcise and transcend the colonial project, a way to forgiveness, healing and a way to attain a state of grace.

As Above So Below: the land we steward bears witness to our genocide As Above So Below was created for With Secrecy and Despatch, Campbelltown Arts Centre, in 2016. This exhibition commemorated the 200th Anniversary of the Appin Massacre in New South Wales, Australia. Using drone cameras two massacre sites were filmed, Appin, Australia and Cypress Hills, Canada. They are beautiful landscapes that hold the memory of Colonial violence (Figure 13.9). The land we steward bears witness to our genocide. This work was edited into a two-channel video and played cinematically on the gallery wall. Tess Allas, curator, facilitated my research by taking me to the Appin memorial site near the Cataract dam. Then we drove down river to the actual site, the cliffs over the Cataract river. The site is located on private land inaccessible yet can be viewed from the opposite side of the river on the narrow winding road. The landscape is a beautiful rocky gorge with the Cataract river below.

Figure 13.9 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

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Figure 13.10 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

On the early morning of 17 April 1816 at least 14 people of the Dharawal tribe were killed when James Wallis’ detachment encountered a camp at Appin near the banks of the Cataract River. They were either shot or made to jump to their deaths (Figure 13.10). The Cypress Hills in Alberta and Saskatchewan Canada is recognized as a unique environment, its beauty is renowned (Figure 13.11). It is the only land surface that remained exposed during the last Ice Age, and so retained flora and fauna from the previous epoch. My people call this place I-kime-kooy or “striped earth or earth over earth.” The cree call it manâtakâw “beautiful upland” and the Assiniboine call it wazihe “the mountain by itself.” Fort Walsh is now situated on the site where the Cypress Hills massacre occurred on June 1, 1873, near Battle Creek in Saskatchewan. It involved a group of American bison and wolf hunters, Canadian whisky traders, Metis cargo haulers and a camp of Assiniboine people. Thirteen or more Assiniboine warriors and one wolfer died in the conflict. The massacre was a result of the Assiniboine being mistaken for a group of “Indians” that stole the hunter’s horses. It could be that it was my people, the Blackfoot, who stole the horses and the Assiniboine were blamed as the Cypress Hills are a part of Blackfoot territory. Sadly, there was little understanding of the diversity of Indigenous tribes, the colonial project has a way of reducing us all into one category, the “Indian.” “Kill the Indian in the child” and “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” were the sentiments of that time.

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Figure 13.11 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

The video opens with GPS coordinates for both the Appin Massacre site and the Cypress Hills Massacre sites (Figure 13.12). I decided to use GPS coordinates instead of the naming the actual sites as it relates to military drone coordinates that are often displayed on drone video footage. Drone filming is a relatively new medium for art video making yet the use of drones has a long history, specifically military. The use of drones by the military for the collecting of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance has increased exponentially in the past 15 years. Drones offer a bird’s eye view of the world, yet issues of air space and privacy are forefront and contentious. As well, the ethics of using drones in warfare have and will continue to be debated. In the context of my video, the drone becomes the eye, the spirit that views the landscape from above and below. Along with the GPS coordinates, the sound of a heartbeat fills the space, the indicator of life. Suddenly, a single gunshot rings out, signalling death and the beginning of the drone footage montage. The gunshot is from a period musket, that would have been used at both sites in the 1800s. The heartbeat stops. The drone footage montage starts with the Appin massacre site on the left as you face the wall. The footage is played in silence, which creates a space of meditation, to view and think about the landscape presented. It then cuts to the Cypress hills massacre site, giving us sweeping views of the valley and trees. The montage continues to the end, both sites playing beside each other until the camera rises steadily upward it then ends with two quotes, “Captain Wallis and Woman who eats Grizzly Bear,”1 while

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Figure 13.12 Adrian Stimson. As Above So Below. Photographer: Simon Hewson (2016). Image courtesy of the artist and Campbelltown Arts Centre.

an early version of “God Save the King” plays on. The video speaks to two places of colonization, one in the Southern Hemisphere and one in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result of the Colonial project, we share common experiences, these massacre sites have become sacred places to Indigenous peoples. Our memory and current understanding of these massacres gives us the strength and resolve to change the system that continues to uphold colonial beliefs and ultimately genocide. In spite of the trauma that took place at these sites, they are beautiful places, beautiful landscapes forever changed into deathscapes by the colonial project.

Aggressive Assimilation and Silent Witness: towards a new way to walk in this world Aggressive Assimilation 2013 addresses the intergenerational impact of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (Figure 13.13). My father attended Old Sun Residential School and I attended Gordon and Lebret Indian Residential schools. The triptych features a photograph of the Anglican-run Old Sun Residential school flanked by portraits of my father Adrian Stimson and me, both of us young, my father at the age when he was about to finish his time at Old Sun, whilst I am just entering the schools. The history of Canada’s aggressive assimilationist policies is represented by the Old Sun Residential School dividing father and son as well as linking them

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Figure 13.13 Adrian Stimson. Aggressive Assimilation.

through colonial violence. By dividing the images of my father and myself with the symbol of the school, I hoped to show the connection between both of our experiences, to witness the physical detachment within families and community and the resulting intergenerational trauma. Aggressive Assimilation was a policy of the Canadian government, developed to mould children into good little colonial subjects. Criminal abuse took place in these schools; sexually, physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. Many children died and generations of survivors, including myself, have testified to the horrors experienced. Silent Witness 2015 was a durational performance in association with the MacKenzie Art Gallery exhibition Moving Forward, Never Forgetting (Figure 13.14). This was a durational performance that took place at the University of Regina. Over three days, I sat in the halls of the University for six hours each day wearing my late father’s buckskin regalia, silent, staring forward. I reference my father’s and my experience in residential schools. I placed an empty chair beside me for anyone wanting to join me; on the wall behind is a photo of the Old Sun Residential School and on the table a portrait of my father and me. To sit in silence is meditative, to sit in silence in a busy corridor was an intervention, a deliberate act of resistance to the Colonial Project. On one of these days an Indigenous man came to visit me, he sat with his hand drum, then began to drum, singing a healing song. Healing tears streamed down my cheeks, remembering my father, remembering our innocence taken. It was a moment when time stood still, a time before the colonial project, a time when we were ourselves, trauma free. Canada still has a long way to go in reconciling its genocidal past. The slow pace is concerning yet it is happening. Indigenous peoples are leading the way to a new understanding, a new way to walk in this world. To change these deathscapes back into what they once were, a full and vibrant landscape where the people thrived and prospered since time immemorial.

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Figure 13.14 Adrian Stimson. Silent Witness.

Note 1 Historians question the authenticity of this quote as it was part of the local shop keeper journals, if so, it is yet again another example of the manipulation of Indigenous voice.

References National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 2019. “Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Ottawa: Privy Council Office. https://www.mmiwgffada.ca Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). 1996. Final Report, 5 volumes. Ottawa: Canada Communication Group Publishing. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Reports. 2008. http://nctr.ca/ reports.php

Part V

Afterwords

14 After Abolition Kyle Carrero Lopez

Prisons and cops survive only in tales for the young Like twin Atlantises or two drowned boogeymen. A cop’s as harmless a Halloween getup as any monster, while a prisoner costume’s as taboo as a slave one now that schools teach what makes them kin. A prison is the far-off past of a structure turned free housing, each cell wall knocked to sandcastle ruin, halls reshaped and re-dyed in green paints, former floor plans carved out like shores into spacious homes, laundry and A/C a given in each. Though prisons and cops won’t be found anywhere, our youths still learn of them, and they know what they mean, how they look, how they function, what it will take to stop them if they return with new names.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-24

15 Transformative justice Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese

What if we were to bury the statues—of the colonisers, the slave owners, the genocidal tyrants? Not just topple and dispatch them unceremoniously to the dust heap of history—but, rather, enact ceremonies of burial and formal closure? It is more than they deserve, we hear some say. A violent felling and brutal dispatch constitute a fitting end to these murderers. Yet, these urgent gestures risk leaving too much that is unresolved and thus open—open to the unexpected return of the living dead who refuse to die because of the entrenched intransigence of their colonial systems, with their settler theft of unceded Indigenous lands, racial hierarchies of privilege and subjugation and racist regimes of incarceration and elimination. Ceremonies of formal burial are needed in order to ensure that, once these leaden figures and the violent regimes that they animate and sustain are toppled, they are closed over into the depths of the earth with a decisive finality, there where they will decompose and return to nourishing other forms of life: those very forms of life that they worked to enslave, exploit, imprison and disappear. The act of interring will seal the rupture of the toppling. And the burial seal will forever after be attended by a state of vigilance to ensure the finality of this closure. The burial ceremonies enacted by the survivors of these violent regimes and their emblematic henchmen—Columbus, Cook, Cortés, Lee and so on—will be festive, enlivened by songs of survivance and liberatory dance, as performed by the all the motley peoples who could never fit within the racial frames of these colonial-racist regimes except as slaves, specimens or prisoners. Perhaps the emptied pedestals will remain. Voided of their leaden-dead figures, they will become spaces for the living and for the ceremonial performance of cultural flourishing. The monochrome of bronze will be replaced with the colours of turquoise, coral red, sun yellow and lapis blue—a vibrant return of all the colours that had been violently suppressed by the chromophobic settler state. This triumphant and gloriously chromatic return is exemplified by the image of Teia McGahey, Hadassah GreenSky and Joelle Miller—three Indigenous jingle dressers who defiantly struck ceremonial stances on the pedestal and base of the toppled

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-25

Transformative justice  259 Christopher Columbus statue, in Detroit, USA, on 4 July 2020 (see image by Rosa María Zamarrón in De Vito 2020). In the face of the enormity of the repressive apparatus of the carceral state—its prisons, its custodial cells, its police, its surveillance technologies and, not least, its criminal justice system—reformist moves can only work to reproduce a series of piecemeal changes that effectively leave the infrastructure of killing violence largely intact, precisely because reformism can only ever be coherent by adopting the language of the carceral master. Reformism, in other words, achieves its intelligibility and legitimacy only by reproducing, by default, the very terms dictated by the racial-carceral state. Operating under the legitimating imprimatur of an ethical reconstruction of civil society, carceral reformism turns to the very laws that are a priori inscribed by a disavowed racial violence that must be ignored— precisely to enable its reformist fictions of “salvage” and “justice,” fictions that effectively leave the violence of the status quo foundationally intact. “If ethics is possible for white civil society within its social discourses,” Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton underscore, “it is rendered irrelevant to the systematic violence deployed against the outside precisely because it is ignorable. Indeed, the ignorability becomes the condition of possibility for the ethical coherence of the inside” (2003: 172). It can only be within the very locus of (disavowed, because ignorable) institutionalised white violence as

Figure Afterword 1 Saying Their Names, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia, June 2020. Installation in solidarity with George Floyd protests. Photo: Anonymous. Reproduced with permission.

260  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese the expression of civil society that the ethic of reformism can maintain its coherency. As Martinot and Sexton note, this structure is founded on “a dichotomy between a white ethical dimension and the irrelevance of police” violence: “It is a twin structure, a regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror and the seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a double economy of terror, structured by a ritual of incessant performance” (2003: 172). The Deathscapes project and the chapters in this volume attest to the lived reality of this double economy of terror and its ritual of incessant murderous performance. If anything emerges from the pages of this volume, it is the serial killing power of the racial-carceral state—and its ignorability for the white overseers who reside outside its lethal structures and who are largely untouched by its agents of racialized violence, even as they continue to fuel its reproduction under the guise of reformism. If anything emerges from the pages of this volume, it is the transnational power of the racial-carceral state, and its shared techniques of killing violence, elimination through imprisonment and its militarisation of policing and surveillance. We open and close this volume with two images (Figures Part I.1 and Afterword 1) that attest to the serial and transnational killing violence of the racial-carceral state: Saying Their Names, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia, June 2020 (see Qwaider and Perera 2020). Organised by a group of activists, including some of the contributors to this volume, to mark their solidarity with George Floyd in the wake of his killing by the police, the names of Indigenous people who had died in custody were projected on a local landmark. The projections articulated the transnational relations of institutionalised violence that bind the lives and deaths of racialized subjects who continue to die in ever-growing numbers in both the U.S. and Australian contexts—all sanctioned by the “law, clothed in the ethic of impunity” and “contingent on the repetition of its violence” (Martinot and Sexton 2003: 176). The two images from Saying Their Names, Walyalup [Fremantle], Australia, June 2020 reference the naming of those killed by the racial state (Hughes 2020; Qwaider and Perera 2020). They establish an arc across the expanse of this volume: they at once mark the killing power of the racial-carceral state and its ongoing contestation by the communities who are its targets. The activist event projected the names of some of the over 400 Indigenous people who had died in custody since 1998 on a sculpture known as Rainbow, by artist Marcus Canning. The site, Number 1 Canning Highway, is at a local crossroads to the city of Walyalup [Fremantle], facing Fremantle Harbour. The island of Wadjemup is just visible in the distance, where Aboriginal prisoners in neck chains and shackles were ferried across the water to Rottnest prison, the largest deaths in custody site in Australia. The sculpture, “a series of multicolored shipping containers linked into the shape of an arch, invokes the inclusive openness of a port

Transformative justice  261 city, a gateway to all that lies beyond” (Perera 2020). However, this display of “inclusive openness” is belied by the histories that attend the site, the name of Canning and those of other settler families whose names are ubiquitous across the city’s monuments and public infrastructure: “Canning is another architect of the settler infrastructure of this state. His projects include the Rabbit Proof Fence and the Canning Stock Route, designed to open beef markets for the graziers of the north. Following his work on the stock route, Canning faced a Royal Commission of inquiry on charges relating to his treatment of the Indigenous people in its path”—of which he was then duly acquitted (Perera 2020). The containers upon which the names of the dead were projected in the course of Saying Their Names emblematise the intersection of the political economy of the racial state with its carceral regime of containment and elimination. The containers do not metaphorize this intersection; rather, they literally embody it. On the one hand, the containers evidence their increasing deployment by the racial state as jail cells “due to major overcrowding in conventional prisons” (Tiger Containers 2019). Promoted as a “green solution” to the massive uptake of resources in the construction of prisons, the containers can warehouse “up to 36 inmates … in a converted 40-foot shipping container” (Tiger Containers 2019). The racial-carceral state has instrumentalised containers into “penal technologies” that are being used to incarcerate the spectrum of the racial state’s targets: from the detainees in Guantánamo to asylum seekers and refugees (Pugliese 2009). On the other hand, the containers are the quintessential symbol of transnational flows of capital and commodities predicated on the violent asymmetries of racial capitalism and its extractive economies. The fraught power of the container, as both carceral instrumentality and vector of mobile commodities, is perhaps nowhere more graphically materialised than in its use to traffic asylum seekers and refugees across state borders—often with lethal outcomes (Pugliese 2009: 159–160). Projecting the names of the racialized dead on this arch of containers effectively “mark[s] the outlines of white supremacist excess within its banality” (Martinot and Sexton 2003: 180): here the always excess, because serial, racialized dead inscribed on that banal, because quotidian, infrastructural unit of the carceral state and its economy of racial capitalism. In this context, reformism and its disavowed predication on the “fraudulent ethics of social order” (Martinot and Sexton 2003: 172) will merely leave the foundational violence of the racial-carceral state more or less intact, even as it continues to promote its seemingly progressive solutions. What is needed is abolition, specifically, abolition as the impossible. In their meditation on the “perverse proliferation of policing everywhere, and without determinable limit,” Petero Kalulé and James Trafford (2020) articulate the problematics of attempting to circumscribe abolition within the space of the possible: “within a space of possibility pre-emptively shaped

262  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese by and through policing, abolition would be constricted and navigable only as the dialectical opposition that conserves the political.” The correlative of this, they argue, is that abolition inscribed within the domain of politics (which would be the domain of the possible) would no longer be abolition, for it would be conceptually confined within the dialectics of resistance, refusal, fugitivity, and Police—all of which are limits, determinable horizons and measures of certitude. (2020) Effectuated within the carceral state’s racialized double move of reformexpansion is what Ruth Gilmore Wilson (2007: 247) terms as the “state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” The lethality and transnational dimensions of this group-differentiated vulnerability are attested to by the embodied subjects named across the diverse chapters of this book: Indigenous peoples, Black people, people of colour and refugees captured within the carceral state’s determinable apparatuses that reproduce with certitude the serial, but never fungible, embodied figures of “deaths in custody” or “deaths at the border.” Kalulé and Trafford (2020) suggest that perhaps the only exit from this self-sustaining “omni-topology” of interminable reformism of the carceral state—a Möbius loop that continues to guarantee, even as it challenges, the reproduction of the carceral state—is to “think with and of abolition as the impossible so as to undo the dialectic manoeuvre that would ascribe and delimit abolition to political proscription, containment and to category.” Abolition, within this impossible schema, emerges precisely as that which would be non-dialectisable by the carceral state: it is what it cannot contain, absorb or co-opt; in a word, abolition would be its unassimilable impossibility. The impossibility of abolition is what the carceral state cannot possibly countenance or assimilate as it would be tantamount to its dissolution. Writing from the locus of the Australian settler state, this unassimilable vista of impossibility resonates, for us, along another critical axis: Indigenous sovereignty and the abolition of the settler colonial state—an entity that is coterminous with the carceral state. In her trenchant critique of all the reformist (for example, settler “constitutional recognition,” see Giannacopoulos Chapter 2) and legislative (for example, Mabo No. 2 Native Title) assimilationist moves mobilised by the Australian settler state to continue to legitimate its usurpation of Indigenous lands and sovereignties, Irene Watson (2007: 31) poses two foundational questions that pivot on impossibility: “Decolonisation, for Australia, is it an impossibility? Perhaps. Can it be dreamed and visioned? Yes. Can the dream be realised? It has been before.” For Watson (2007: 43), the realisation of this impossibility can only emerge from a “coming to know that the limit placed upon us in this time now, that of impossibility, was itself an illusion, a trauma brought upon

Transformative justice  263 us by an age of violence.” Unloosed from the chains of the possible, and overcoming the trauma of an age of violence, the impossible here names the future that the reformist ruse of postcolonialism could never deliver: decolonisation; simultaneously, the impossible concretises a reality that would otherwise be unthinkable and thus unrealisable. In his poem, After Abolition (see Chapter 14), Kyle Carrero Lopez also traces an impossible future that has been realised. After abolition, prisons and cops will become nightmare fables. In the wake of abolition, he writes, the structures of incarceration—prisons, detention camps, custodial cells—will be subject to acts of transformative justice: “turned free housing,” “former floor plans carved out like shores/ into spacious homes.” New lives of flourishing on the ruins of violence; restitutive justice wrested from the dismantled structures of captivity, torture and death. Prisons, detention centres, custodial cells—all will become phantasmagoric Atlantises, to draw on Lopez’s metaphor, finally buried and effaced by the centuries-long waves of abolitionist activism. Lopez’ poem speaks to the ultimate aim of the Deathscapes project: the abolition of the racial-prison-industrial-border complex as the governing lynchpin of the settler state. All the chapters across the book have delineated the varied structures, processes and relations of power that maintain this carceral lynchpin. All of the chapters in this book, simultaneously,

Figure Afterword 2 “Still No Truth, Justice or Peace. Unresolved Killing,” Invasion Day, 26 January 2018, Sydney, Australia. Photo: Joseph Pugliese.

264  Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese gesture toward the dream of abolition, even as they negotiate what appears as an intractable reality of solidified violence. Animating all the chapters is a glimpse of justice to come: it is what drives this activist-scholarship. This justice to come is what will finally overturn the present painful refrain of “still no truth, justice or peace” (Figure Afterword 2) – a refrain that emerges from the open wounds of innumerable unresolved killings, open wounds gouged by the implacable violence of the settler state and its lethal carceral apparatuses. And when justice comes, after abolition, Lopez reminds us of what will be at stake: Though prisons and cops won’t be found anywhere, our youths still learn of them, they know what they mean, how they look, how they function, what it will take to stop them if they return with new names.

References DeVito, Lee. 2020. “Stunning Photo Shows Indigenous Women Posing Where Detroit’s Christopher Columbus Statue Stood.” Detroit Metro Times, July 6, 2020. https://www.metrotimes.com/the-scene/archives/2020/07/06/stunning-photoshows-indigenous-women-posing-where-detroits-christopher-columbus-statueonce-stood (accessed January 15 2021). Hughes, Shaheen. 2020. “Write What Should Not Be Forgotten.” Medium. June 19. https://medium.com/@shaheen.hughes/write-what-should-not-be-forgottenc12875698351 (accessed 15 July 2020). Kalulé, Petero and James Trafford. 2020. “Unforming Police: The Impossibility of Abolition.” CLT, December 1, 2020. https://criticallegalthinking. com/2020/12/01/unforming-police-the-impossibility-of-abolition/ (accessed January 15 2021). Martinot, Steve and Jared Sexton. 2013. “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy.” Social Identities 9.2: 169–181. Perera, Suvendrini. 2020. “Offshore: Lockdown Topographies.” Overland, February 26. https://overland.org.au/2021/02/off-shore-lockdown-topographies/ Pugliese, Joseph. “Civil Modalities of Refugee Trauma, Death and Necrological Transport.” Social Identities 15.1: 149–165. Qwaider, Ayman, and Suvendrini Perera. 2020. “Saying Their Names, Fremantle.” Deathscapes Engagements. https://www.deathscapes.org/engagements/ localresidents-…ack-lives-matter/ (accessed January 15 2021) Tiger Containers. 2019. “Emerging Trend: The Shipping Container Jail.” https:// www.tigercontainers.com/blog/emerging-trend-the-shipping-container-jail/ (accessed January 15 2021). Watson, Irene. 2007. “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities.” In Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, edited by Suvendrini Perera, 23–43. Perth: Network. Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. abolitionist activism 1, 263 Aboriginal citizenship and politicisation 56 Aboriginal Legal Service 99 Aboriginal Nations passports 1–2, 11 Aboriginal Protection Acts 63, 64 Aboriginal women 82, 88–91, 93–98; genocidal violence 204–215; in justice system 106–123; see also Indigenous women administrative detention 131, 138 After Abolition (Lopez) 256, 263, 264 aggravated felonies 186–187 Aggressive Assimilation (Stimson) 252–253, 253 Agua Zarca project 6 Akomfrah, John 12, 16 Albahari, Maurizio 131 Allas, Ruben 201 Allas, Tess 201, 249 anti-Black racism and BLM 18, 39 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) 186 anti-immigration political agendas 3, 64–65, 131, 136 anti-Muslim racism 151 anti-racist politics 32 anti-Roma racism 154 antisemitism 153 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) 187 anti-violence initiatives 28, 43 anti-violence mobilization 30 anti-violence praxis 25, 36 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 170–171 As Above So Below (Stimson) 249–252, 249–252 aesthetic witnessing 201, 203

asylum seekers 15–16; see also migrants; refugees Australian Research Council xiii, 4, 49 Ayton, Darshini 109 Azimitabar, Mostafa 11 Baires, Juan Carlos 183; antiretroviral regime 193; HIV positive 191–192; ICE 183; immune system 190; medical policies and procedures 189; mismedication 184 Baldry, Eileen 73, 74 Balla, Paola 85 Bandesh, Farhad 11 Barrowcliffe, Rose 85, 93–94 Basaglia, Franco 131, 136 Baxter, Veronica 97 Bhattacharyya, Gargi 157, 159 “big data” 170 biopolitical border zones 164 biopower 185 Black–Brown alliances 32 Black feminism 30–31, 32 Black Lives Matter Movement 17, 18, 39, 73, 106, 154, 223, 240 Black Power movement 56 Black sexual politics 32 Blight, David W. 12, 13 Bochenek, Michael 70 Boffey, Daniel 154 Boochani, Behrouz 11 borders 50–57; violence 64–66, 73–75; in Aboriginal mapping 232; externalization of 137–138; frozen borderline 165 Bseiso, Jehan 133

266 Index Buey, Francisco Fernández 154 Buffalo Boy (Stimson) 240–247, 243 Call Them Home (Mohammedali) 130, 130, 134 Call to Account 200, 200–201 Canning, Alfred 261 Canning, Marcus 260 carceral feminism 122 Cardini, Franco 141 Carlson, Bronwyn 81–82, 93 Carlton, Bree 73, 74 “Carpet Karaoke” 17 Charlie, baby 115–119 Chatterjee, Piya 50 Cobb, Jelani 13 Cohen, Kathy 32 Collins, Patricia Hill 10, 24–25 colonialism and western cartography 227–229, 229 colonial violence 26, 88, 114 combat breathing 16–19 Conor, Liz 87, 88 Constitutional racism 32 Coombs, Gretchen 10 counter-archive, anti-archive 10, 12 Covid-19 83, 148, 156–159, 157 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 30 critical cartography 232–235 cross-disciplinary approach 9–10, 48 Cruz, José Miguel 171 Cullors, Patrice 18 Cunneen, Chris 51, 73, 74 Custody Notification Service (CNS) 120 “cyberspatial” dimensions 173–174 Cyprus Hill Massacre 202, 210–211 data silence, settler archive, social media and 84–85 Davis, Angela 67, 74, 158 deadening labour 132 dead territories 158–160 debtscape 57–59, 59 Deathscapes case studies, At aLethal Intersection: The Killing of MsDhu 34–35, 227; Indigenous Femicide and the Killing State 6, 81, 120–121, 234; Every Boat is the First Boat 131, 133; The Road: Passage through the Deathscape 13, 15–16, 47 Deathscapes projects 4, 6, 7, 51, 217 Deathscapes site 24–26; aesthetic articulation 9; activism and 9–19, 35; “anti-archive” 10, 12; architectonics

9; coalitional interventions 10; countermapping state violence 14–16; “courtyard garden” 9;debtscapes and 63; iterative violence 14; MilitaryIndustrial-Border Complex 7; prisonindustrial complex 14; sovereignty 3; Weaponized Exposure 7 deaths in custody 4, 7, 10, 14, 16, 28, 47–48, 82, 98, 106, 120, 223 Deaths Inside Project 48 Deer, Sarah 5, 87 Dent, Gina 67 Dhu, Ms 25, 26, 34–36, 48, 95–96, 119–122, 204, 212, 227 digitalized border 175–176; “cyberspatial” dimensions 173– 174; digital knowledge-exchange 172; disciplining functions 174; gatekeeping powers, online-offline nexus 169–171; trans-border cybersecurity agencies 164 Dillon, Stephen 74 disciplinary power 36–39 disciplinary violence 29 Diverlus, Rodney 18 Donaghue, Stephen 71 Dungay, David 16–18 DuVernay, Ava 38 Egger, Lukas 152 Elden, Stuart 166, 167, 174, 175 El-Enany, Nadine 17 EU immigration policy 133–135, 166, 170–171 Eurocentrism 219–220; Eurocentric legitimation 143 EU search-and-rescue missions 169 femicide, Indigenous 6, 81, 86, 120–121; Indigenous femicide and resistance 6 Fernandez, Manny 66 Floyd, George 12, 18, 39, 73, 223, 259, 260 Fogliani, Ros 95 Fortress Europe 171, 177 Foucault, Michel 166, 167, 174, 185 Franklin, M.I. 131 freedom-of-movement rights 163 Freeman, Toby 113 Frontier Massacres 202, 217, 218–219, 222, 223, 226, 228 frontier violence 224

Index  267 Garcés, Helios F. 154 Garland, David 26, 49 Garner, Eric 16–18 gender-based violence 10, 27, 28, 34; genocidal violence, Aboriginal women 204–215; in immigration detention 66–73; histories of 73, 80–81; see also Aboriginal women; femicide; Indigenous women; sexual violence gender inequality 93 Genealogy of Amnesia Project 149–150, 155 George, Lawman Murray 51 Giannacopoulos, Maria 25–26, 63 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 88, 149, 156– 157, 159 Glenn, Evelyn Nakano 184 Goldscheid, Julie 66, 70 Gonan, Lina 155 Gore, Jody 107–111; connectedness 112–115; incomprehensibility 112–115; justice arguments against 111–112 Gough, Julie 80, 81–82, 201, 202, 205–207, 207–210, 215 Green, P 172 Gregory, Derek 149, 154 Gržinić, Marina 132 hate speech and violence 39–43 Harney, Bill 233 Hartman, Saidiya 74 Heidegger, Martin 226, 230 Hill, Jess 115 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 185 Holocaust 153 hospitality-detention complex 131, 139 Hunter, Sue-Anne 95 Hunt, Sarah 5 Ihde, Don 230 Idle No More 240 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) 187 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 183 immigration detention 11, 26, 65, 70, 184, 189, 194; centres 33, 175; necropolitics of uncare 185–189 Incarcerated Stories 65 Inda, Jonathan 131–132

Indigenous cosmological knowledges 232–235 Indigenous identities 5 Indigenous peoples 3, 5, 7, 33, 38, 48, 52–58, 65, 82, 84–90, 94, 98, 262 Indigenous sovereignty 3, 56, 262 Indigenous Studies and Migration Studies 7 Indigenous transgender women 84, 97 Indigenous women 5–6, 80–84, 86–89; “About All Women” program 91; gender inequality 93; Indigenous and transgender women 84, 97; shared recognition 94; social justice 90; social media 90, 94; women’s rights movement 89; violence against 106–123; see also Aboriginal women; Indigenous femicide inquest 127–128; coronial 16, 97, 106 institutionalized violence 37, 38, 136 internet governmentality 166 interpersonal microaggressions 42 intersectional analyses: anti-racist politics 32; anti-violence praxis 36; Black–Brown alliances 32; collaboration and coalition politics 31; Constitutional racism 32; cultural continuity 35; Deathscapes project models 35, 35; gender-based violence 34; governmental policies 33; Indigenous activism 32; intellectual leadership 31; intra-community violence 31; participatory democracy 36; political domination 34; social justice projects 36; social justice sensibilities 31; social movement activism 35; state-sanctioned violence 34 intersectionalities: Deathscapes 24–26; discourse of 27; lethal intersections 27–28 intimate state violence 69 intra-community violence 31 Islamophobia 152, 153 Israeli settler-colonialism 8, 13, 14, 220 Jackson, Ray 1, 2, 97 James, Joy 69 Jaspers, Karl 225 Jay, Martin 225 Jiwani, Yasmin 87 justice system, and Aboriginal women 106–121, 107

268 Index Kalulé, Petero 261–262 Klimm, Kerry 95 Kovács, Eva 153 Laing, Rosemary 15 Latina feminism 30 law enforcement 165 LBGTQ people 27–30, 41 Lean, Tabitha 98 Le Miere, Rene 118 Lethabo King, Tiffany 65 Levin, David 225 Levi, Primo 136–137 Liddle, Celeste 94 Longbottom, Marlene 92, 93, 98–99 Lopez, Kyle Carrero 263, 264 Lorde, Audre 230 MacMahon, Paul 97 Macquarie, Lachlan 205 Maira, Sunaina 50 mapping 31, 47, 131, 202, 218, 219, 221–222, 226–229, 235 Martinot, Steve 259, 260 mass incarceration policies 39 Mattawa, Khaled 133 Mbembe, Achille 185, 189 McCue, Terry 205 McGlade, Hannah 73, 81, 88, 90–93, 107, 120 McGuire, Amy 88, 96–97, 97–98 Mediterranean maritime circulation 141 military-industrial-border complex 7, 13, 16 Ministry of Immigration and Border Protection 72 Mohammedali, Marziya 130, 130, 134 Mohawk Interruptus (Simpson) 64 Møller, Michael 167 Morrison, Scott 94 Mubenga, Jimmy 16, 17–18 Mullaley, Tamica 115–119 Naimou, Angela 134 Nannup, Laurel 201, 213–215, 214 Nazi propaganda 41 necropolitics of uncare 184 necro-transport 15 Newsome, Hawk 17 nomophilia 46; colonial nomopoly/ constitutional borders 53, 56–57 nomopoly 25, 46–47, 57 non-binary people 84, 86 Nsengiyumva, Laura 150

ocularcentrism 225–226 Ongaro, Franca Basaglia 131, 136 Operation Sovereign Borders 67 O’Sullivan, Sandy 84 Owen, Chris 215 Paik, A. Naomi 149, 154 participatory democracy 36 Perera, Suvendrini 49, 120 perpetual trauma: As Above So Below (Stimson) 249–252, 249–252; Aggressive Assimilation (Stimson) 252–253, 253; Buffalo Boy (Stimson) 240–247, 243; COVID-19 240; RCAP 239; Sick and Tired (Stimson) 247–249, 248; Silent Witness (Stimson) 252–253, 254; Truth and Reconciliation commission 239 policing-humanitarian mechanisms 138 postphenomenology 230–232 post-Westphalian internet governmentality 174 Pugliese, Joseph 49, 171, 222, 224, 229 Qwaider, Ayman 14 racial capitalism 156–157 racialization 4, 8, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156, 160 racialized deaths 4; racialized state violence 12, 27, 48; colonial and neocolonial violence 221–222 racialized violence, Europe 153; antiMuslim racism 151; anti-Roma racism 154; antisemitism 153; Covid19 148, 156–159, 157; Genealogy of Amnesia Project 149–150, 155 Recognise Campaign 47, 56 “reformist” approach 46 refugee camps 156, 158–160; offshore 11, 67–73 refugee crisis 172 refugee and migrant deaths 7, 130–132, 133–134, 157, 168–169, 183 refugee testimonies 11 Reynolds, Linda 94 Robinson, Cedric 157 Rodriguez, Lelis 184 Rodriguez, Richard 64–65 Rolfe, Zachary 58 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADC) 106 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) 239

Index  269 Said, Edward 220 self-defence 30 settler-colonial genealogies 64–66 settler colonial archive, social media and 84–85 settler colonialism 63, 73 settler state 1–7, 14, 32, 62, 63, 73, 81, 84 Seuffert, Nan 70 Sexton, Jared 74, 259, 260 sexual commodification 73 sexual oppression 27 sexual violence 26, 62–64, 73–75, 87–88; normalised 66–69 Sharpe, Christina 148 Sharratt, Stephen 117 Shohat, Ella 219–220 Sick and Tired (Stimson) 247–249, 248 Silent Witness (Stimson) 252–253, 254 Silverstein, Jordana (Jordy) 10, 12, 48 Simpson, Audra 6, 62, 64, 65 slavery, histories of 12–14, 73–75, 80 Smith, Andrea 88 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 230 social justice 9, 217 social media 99; and racialized violence, Europe 159 social movement activism 35, 39 Somay, Benyamin 135 Sovereign power 4–5 sovereignty 1, 2–4, 64; and crimes of peace 135–140; critical counter sovereignties 67, 140–145; and hospitality 3; and immigration policies 134–135; Indigenous 3, 56, 262; Mediterranean border deathscapes and 133; refugees and asylum seekers 4; settler colonial 64 Speed, Shannon 7, 65 Spillers, Hortense 74 Stam, Robert 219–220 state-sanctioned terrorism 27 state-sanctioned violence 34, 37 state trafficking 4–5 state violence archive 47–48 Stel, Nora 148 Stimson, Adrian 201, 202–203, 209–213, 211–213, 215, 224; As Above So Below 249–252, 249–252; Aggressive Assimilation 252–253, 253; Buffalo Boy 240–247, 243; Sick and Tired 247–249, 248; Silent Witness 252–253, 254 Stirling, James 214

Stolen Wages campaign 63 Stümer, Jenny 151 Sullivan, Corrinne 86, 87 Takei, Carl 74 Tanzola, Cristina 66 Tarrant, Stella 82 Taylor, Diana 221 terra nullius 14 territorial violence 4–5 Thornton, Warwick 202, 232–234 Thorpe, Nakari 2 Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum 219, 224 Trafford, James 261–262 trans-border cybersecurity agencies 164 transformative justice: abolition 261, 262; and reformism 260; “still no truth, justice or peace” 263, 264 transnational state violence 18 Traverso, Antonio 9, 10, 12, 201–202 Trávez, Diego Falconí 151 Trump, Donald 13, 42 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 239 turbo-fascism 150, 155 Turnbull, David 232, 234 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 168 US jails, “other penalties” 69–73, 71 US settler-genocidal-slave state 63 Veracini, Lorenzo 84 violence: anti-violence initiatives 43; borders 64–66, 73–75; definition 24; democratic political process 43; and disciplinary power 36–39; gender oppression 27, 28; hate speech 40, 41; ideology 40; implications 43–44; Indigenous bodies and sexual(useful) ness 86–89; innovative analysis 44; interpersonal microaggressions 42; interpretive climates 42; intersectional analyses 31–36, 35; intersectionality discourse 27; lethal intersections 27–31; political domination 27; political mobilization 41; propaganda 40; racial (see racial violence); settler state 84; sexual (see sexual violence); social change 44; speech cultures 39; state 14–16, 19, 47–48, 69 Virilio, Paul 225–226 visual culture 9

270 Index visualisation 225–226 visuality 217, 220, 224–227 Voting Rights Act 29 WA Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) 117–118 Walker, Kumanjayi 50–51 Ward, Mr 13, 15, 47–48 Ward, T. 172 Watego, Chelsea 89 Watson, Irene 53, 262

Weaponized Exposure 7 Weidinger, Bernhard 151–152 western cartography 227–229, 229 White Australia Policy 2 Whittaker, Alison 82, 94 Williams, George 51, 52 Windschuttle, Keith 218–219 Wolfe, Patrick 53, 55–56, 84 Yacoub, Raed 14 Young, Mary Lynn 87