Whiteness Studies in the Australian Academe in 2009, Some Comments

ACRAWSA e-journal, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2009 EDITORIAL: WHITENESS STUDIES IN THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEME IN 2009, SOME COMMENTS LEIGH BOUCHER & JANE CAREY The articles in this issue all emerged out Journal on the “politics of good feeling”: of the intellectual and political work that how “certain bodies are seen as the took place during the 2008 Re-Orienting origin of bad feeling, as getting in the Whiteness Conference in Melbourne. i way of public happiness”. Here, Ahmed First, then, we would like to thank all the argued the continuing need for presenters and participants who made attention to “histories that hurt”. Making the trip to Melbourne in early December. links between the painful history of In many ways, the following articles colonialism, the study of whiteness, and attest to both the vitality of whiteness regimes of “productive” political feeling studies in Australia and the political in the present, she explained, “The challenges that currently shape the field. history of happiness is inseparable from The conference itself represented the the history of empire … happiness was fusion of two nascent conference used to justify European imperialism as a traditions: the annual ACRAWSA moral project … The civilising mission conference which has, without question, could be described as a happiness provided a focus and impetus for the mission”. She concluded, “We cannot let solidification of the field in Australia, and go of this history, we cannot give up the Historicising Whiteness conference labouring over its sore points … [we held in 2006, which brought together cannot] cover over bad feelings and historians interested in the study of the pasts they keep alive … We might whiteness. In 2006, the latter – perhaps need to hold on to histories of suffering, to the convenors surprise – revealed just to stay as sore as our points” (Ahmed how much work Australian historians 2008: 12 & 14). History, then, as a series of were producing in the field (Boucher, stories we choose to tell about the past, Carey and Ellinghaus 2007). Thus, while is centrally implicated in the way we in keeping with the best traditions of understand our present and the whiteness studies this collection is possibilities (and need) for change certainly interdisciplinary, historical within it. perspectives are well represented. Equally, the 2008 conference was an Historians at the 2006 and 2008 attempt to bring whiteness studies and conferences – the editors of this edition postcolonial theory into more careful amongst them – suggested that history dialogue – in part because we would has something specific to contribute to suggest that elements of postcolonial the field of whiteness studies; namely, an theory direct scholars to the material increased attention to the importance contexts of power and imperialism (see of time and place. As we (with Katherine (Boucher, Carey and Ellinghaus 2008). Ellinghaus) have argued, whiteness needs to be more robustly historicized In one sense, then, this issue follows on because the mechanisms that maintain from Sara Ahmed’s (2008: 1) reflections its power and legitimacy are far too in the 2008 edition of the ACRAWSA e- variable to the explained by any ISSN 1832-3898 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2009 BOUCHER & CAREY: WHITENESS STUDIES IN THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEME straightforward Manichean binary. While embed our theoretical assumptions historians have recently incorporated about racial privilege more carefully in the terms “white” and “whiteness” into times and places. their analytic vocabulary, “the specificities of how, historically, white This insight has substantive implications identity was formed and shaped are for both the critical study of whiteness only starting to be examined” (Carey, (as an identity and as an oppressive Boucher and Ellinghaus 2007: vii). relation) and the field’s utility as a Although the vitality of whiteness studies mechanism to interrogate our own has been produced, in part, by its contemporary academic context. As interdisciplinarity – even as historians the accounts of pedagogy, university have produced some of its crucial US administration, knowledge production scholarship – an historicised approach to and university hiring in this edition whiteness differs in substantive ways from confirm, the intellectually “possessive much existing scholarship. Whilst logic” of whiteness is manifesting in whiteness studies (alongside, we would newly oppressive ways. On the other suggest, postcolonial theory) has hand, histories of whiteness are not produced a rich theoretical and political without their own political and vocabulary to interrogate racial power theoretical problems; interrogating the and privilege, historians have expressed operation of racial privilege in the past a little discomfort with the ways in which can, in some ways, smooth over the this vocabulary often effaces the impact more politically and epistemologically on and experiences of historically challenging implications of whiteness embedded people. If whiteness studies studies in the present (and perhaps, fundamentally asks scholars to track the many historians have been able to elide unevenly relational character of these implications because of the racialisation (whites and their various temporal distance of their subject). The Others), then historians’ attention to recent histories of multiculturalism and empirical specificity raises a series of racial and apology politics in Australia substantive questions. Whilst have, in many cases, re-oriented the interrogating the “logics”, “grids”, and power and privilege of whiteness in “structures” of whiteness is a crucial rhetorics of inclusion and empowerment project, historical (or historicised) work that fail to address the normalising suggests that the dynamic of imperatives of white racial power. They racialisation and racial privilege are have also, paradoxically, provided new much more temporally variable than a ways to intellectually and institutionally single trans-historical theoretical quarantine both non-white scholars and vocabulary would imply. An historicized the political implications of their work. As approach necessarily involves thinking Aileen Moreton-Robinson remarked in about how the structures and dynamics the final session of the 2008 conference, of whiteness are always oriented by time historians of whiteness might similarly and place. Historians thus tend to be less learn much from their disciplinary interested in “naming” the ways in which neighbours. white racial identity has been normalised, and instead tend to track There is no question that scholars in the the relationship between racialising fields of sociology, political science, dynamics and specific historical and education and (contemporary) cultural political processes and contexts. studies have been much better at Thinking historically about whiteness, thinking about the ways in which the then, suggests that we might need to production of contemporary academic 2 BOUCHER & CAREY: WHITENESS STUDIES IN THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEME knowledge needs to do more than Pratt (2004: 209) point out in relation to simply “take aim” at whiteness. Taking the national imaginary: the challenge of whiteness studies seriously in the academe requires the management of non-white significant epistemological and people in the white nation- institutional transformation. We can’t space is ordered in terms of a simply examine whiteness, add some relationship where white people assume that their place is at the Other subjects and “stir”. Rather, as centre or core of the nation, Susan Mlcek suggests in her article, defined in relation to both whiteness studies needs to question internal non-white others and “what is knowledge, who has it, and external non-white margins or what can be done with it?” As Aileen periphery. Moreton-Robinson (2008: 85-6) argues, the scene of academic knowledge So too, the criticisms generated by production – as it echoes with the wider whiteness studies in the academe, discourses of inclusion and which are so frequently being left up to empowerment – “obscure[s] the more non-white interlocutors to articulate, are complex way that white possession offered inclusion under the terms and functions socio-discursively through parameters of the very white knowledge subjectivity and knowledge production”. it purports to critique. A number of the Whilst scholars in the US might look upon papers in this collection attest to just the continued production of whiteness how difficult securing substantive studies scholarship in Australia with some change can be – not least in the ways in envy (Roediger 2006), its apparent which Indigenous academics and institutional security (indicated by the learners seem to be bearing the political production of work, professional and emotional weight of this associations, conferences, and hiring) transformation. As convenors of the 2008 conceals a troubling resistance (whether conference, we are not unaware of the intentional or patterned) to the ways in which our own conference – at epistemological and institutional times – simultaneously failed to address implications of the field. As the political the material, intellectual and imperatives of whiteness studies and organisational implications of two-way postcolonial theory challenge cross-cultural engagements (and thus pedagogies, knowledges and marginalised non-white knowledges), institutions, the practices and patterns of demanded that non-white speakers the academe (and individuals within it)

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