Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Population—as a concept which determines, categorises and governs mass groups or peoples—is regularly
cited in public discourse on national and community belonging (and non-belonging). Utilising cultural studies
approaches to performativity, mobility and chrononormativity in critical dissonance with the media/cultural
concept of population, this paper argues that a discourse of population operates in everyday practices for
making sense of and manufacturing relationality, mobility and belonging. The production of affective
modalities of belonging in an era conditioned by both the cultural demand for mobility and the cultural
demand for population (size, composition) fixity open opportunities for new ethical approaches to
relationality and similitude for migrant belonging.
6B
Reimagining settler-colonialism (Chair, Chris Healy)
Adam Gall
Towards a settler-colonial studies “without guarantees”: some insights from cultural studies
Settler-colonial studies rests on the understanding of invasion “as a structure rather than an event” (Wolfe,
1994: 96), giving analytical priority to the ongoing dispossession of indigenous people of lands and
livelihood, as well as what Patrick Wolfe refers to as “a cultural logic of elimination” (96). This priority is at
odds with other trends in the new humanities: for example, an interest in the localised, particular, and
contingent (an investment which settler-colonial studies treats with suspicion). When viewed from the
perspective of cultural studies, settler-colonial studies affirms a “naive” cultural theory, a symptomatology
where representations express structures of dispossession, or where successive social institutions express a
fundamental cultural logic. Through a reading of contemporary Australian case studies, this paper argues for
a decolonisation specific to settler-colonial formations but without totalising methodological assumptions
vis-à-vis narrative and representation. It explicates what cultural studies has to offer in undertaking settlercolonial
studies “without guarantees”.
Sadhana Bery
The Continuing Fantasy of a White Nation: Reoccupying an Occupied Land
“The Continuing Fantasy of a White Nation: Reoccupying an Occupied Land” examines a recent event in the
U.S. in which an armed militia of White ranchers occupied Federal land that was itself an already and always
continuing occupation of the Northern Paiute’s land. I argue that the White national fantasy built on colonial
occupation is never complete and requires continuous verification through replays of the re/enactment of
colonization and empire. This accumulation of time is in the service of a futurity that is haunted, not by the
ghosts of the original colonization of unceeded Paiute land and their forced displacement from it in 1879,
but by memories of victorious colonization. The White ranchers demand, “Return us our land” expresses
nostalgia for the enduring fantasy of triumphant colonization and anger at the White state’s betrayal of the
terms of colonization, including loyalty to White fraternity and the unfettered rights of individual capitalist
enterprise.
Thomas Michel Cyborg Wadeye
Skirting around the seething, marginalised town of Wadeye in the Northern Territory of Australia is the
Blacktip Gas Project: a highly automated network of offshore drilling well, processing facilities and pipelines
owned by multinational interests, built to fuel the electricity demands of Northern Australia. This is the
setting for an exploration of contemporary capitalism which I, inspired by the works of Mirowski, Haraway
and others, describe as the Age of Cyborg. The cyborg represents not only the modern blending of human
and machine and the optimisation of the labour-capital production mix, but also the colonisation of mind
and body by the computer. The symbiosis of the Blacktip Project and the people of Wadeye is discussed here
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