10 - Decolonizing the Curriculum in the Colonial Debtscape

Summary

Introduction

Decolonizing curriculum cannot occur without an intention to dismantle the colonial; its logics and its institutions that stretch across unceded sovereign lands entrenching deep injustice. An urgent task for decolonizing curricula across all disciplines in the imperial university is to expose the role and function of colonial law in performing and maintaining dispossession and colonial violence. As a system of law imposed upon First Laws, colonial law forms a nomopoly (a monopoly of law) that lacks consent and so performs nomocide. Nomocide is the killing function of law that reproduces colonial conditions in Australia (Giannacopoulos, 2021). This chapter argues for the necessity of a critical theorization of colonial law and provides an illustration of how such theory can be deployed in pedagogical practice to foster critical literacies across a range of disciplines.

Much of the thinking in this chapter has occurred over many years on Gadigal, Wangal, Bedegal and Kameygal lands (Sydney) where I was born and on Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide) where I lived and worked for over a decade. It was as a wog on these lands, engaging with Indigenous and wog colleagues, intellectuals and activists, that I was able to think seriously about decolonizing the curriculum and what this means. I was born on Gadigal land to migrant parents from Greece. Mum and Dad's life trajectories were shaped by many intersecting geopolitical forces, but two stand out. The mass poverty in Greece in the aftermath of the Second World War, leading to the exporting of the poorest parts of the population, coincided with the desire of the Australian colony to import people to aid industrialization, white possession and dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. Our ability to build lives and futures on unceded lands was the outcome of an illegitimate process that saw the colonial state enact a migration scheme, granting entry to migrants and providing a birthplace for their future children. But granting access to unceded lands was never within their authority to give. This lack of consent and authority to rule, decide and govern is only partially recognized when acknowledgements of Country assert that sovereignty was never ceded; it is rarely acknowledged that laws stemming from an unceded sovereignty must, logically, also be illegitimate. Aboriginal laws were also never ceded.