12 - Assembling Decolonial Anti-Racist Praxis from the Margins: Reflections from Critical Community Psychology

Summary

Introduction

I acknowledge all the people who have come before me, whose stories have been silenced, erased and/ or excluded from the archives of South Africa and Australia. I am inspired by Elders, ancestors, contemporary leaders and people in everyday settings who continue to contest this erasure, the result of slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, the brutal practices of land dispossession and the ‘culture bomb of whiteness’ (Ngugi, 1986). In both countries, this involved the imposition of a hierarchical racial classification system that positioned ‘white’ people at the top and all other people underneath. I have sought to excavate this history, slowly and carefully, seeking to understand these absences, erasures and denials, recovering the complex and diverse stories of our ancestors – stories buried by colonialism, the violence of Apartheid, white supremacy and the various forms of dispossession and injury that this has entailed.

I was born and raised in South Africa during the Apartheid era in what was designated a ‘coloured’ community. My parents and two siblings migrated to Australia in the late 1980s, both because of work opportunities and due to the violence of Apartheid. I have lived in Australia since that time. I am a diasporic subject – I belong here and there, like others who have arrived from different shores and who make lives on the unceded lands of First Nations people. I work at Victoria University on the land of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri of the Kulin Nation. It is on this land that I, a member of the African diaspora, have been learning, deconstructing and co- constructing decolonial praxis through liberation and community psychologies.

In this chapter, I reflect on some work done as part of a research network called the Community Identity Displacement Research Network, which we started at Victoria University in 2012. The network's aim was to bring together people from different disciplines into a learning community, a community of practice, through which we could collaborate and collectively construct justice- oriented research and action. A key question is: How do we create and mobilize liberation community psychologies in and outside the neoliberal university to contribute to the empowerment and self- determination of the various communities who suffer the brunt of colonial and racialized structural violence that produce psychosocial suffering?