5 - (De)constituting Settler Subjects: A Retrospective Critical Race-Decolonizing Account

Summary

Introduction

What pedagogical forces were operative in the construction of my racialized subject positions within the context of the Australian white settler state? In this chapter, I begin to answer this question by deploying critical race-decolonizing theories to trace a genealogy of forces that operated in the constitution of my subjectivity. In the first instance, I proceed to unravel a genealogy that preceded my family's migration to the Australian colony. I work to reconstruct this genealogy in order to materialize the prior forces of settler colonialism and race that already inscribed me as a subject and which were instrumental as push factors in my family's migration. I then proceed to unpack the racialized pedagogy of the white settler state that I was compelled to experience as a non- Anglo diasporic- settler child. My personal account is located in the practice of ‘[c] ritical race theorists [who] use storytelling and counter- storytelling through personal stories … as a critical method to recount … experiences with racism’ (Bargallie, 2020: 85). By examining two school textbooks that were part of my miseducation, I (autoethnographically) trace how these texts pedagogically laboured to inculcate a range of hegemonic values that normalized the racialized violence of the settler state.

In the course of my miseducation at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, I was never exposed to critical race or decolonizing theories. Rather, my critical education took place in an autodidactical manner, despite the institution of formal education, through my reading of such foundational writers as Frantz Fanon, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Jackie Huggins, bell hooks and so on. Through my reading of the works of decolonizing and critical race theorists, I began to acquire a vocabulary that enabled me to name and identify the constituent parts of the settler state that effectively guaranteed its racialized maintenance and reproduction. My own embodied experience of racism, in the context of Anglocentric- assimilationist culture, now found a grammar that rendered culturally intelligible the enmeshed operations of racism and settler colonialism. Ever since, I have worked to transpose the liberatory and transformative power of decolonizing and critical race theories to the pedagogical context within which I work: the university classroom.