ACRAWSA e-journal, Vol.3 , No.1 , 2007 EDITORIAL: THE BORDERPOLITICS OF WHITENESS LARA PALOMBO AND MARIA GIANNACOPOULOS We begin this edition by acknowledging to use Irene Watson’s term, “unsettled”.1 the sovereignty of the Cadigal people, We adopt this term and call the space upon whose land we live in Sydney, and of the Conference “unsettled” because upon whose land this ACRAWSA e- this was a space constituted by diverse journal has been produced. However, it intents to challenge the ‘borderpolitics is against the background of the of whiteness’ as a form of power, but it ongoing denial of Indigenous was also a space invested in whiteness sovereignties as well as the unrelenting or constructed through these same ‘War on Terror’, both on and off shore, borders. In other words, complex that we introduce an edition of the racialised relations of power persist even ACRAWSA e-journal on the Borderpolitics in spaces that have been set up to of Whiteness . This edition contains a critique and dismantle them. Discussions selection of papers, first presented at the at the Conference and at the Borderpolitics of Whiteness Conference Community Forum “The Borderpolitics of in Sydney 2006, that contribute to Communities: Marking Cronulla” discussions of the multiple ways in which indicated that much work still needs to borders and their attendant politics are be done in order to develop strategies continually transforming but still across community and academic operational as white colonial power. spaces to continue to contest colonial The essays and literary work that relations of power. We read the comprise this edition bring to attention controversial discussions that took place the historical formations and at the Community Forum as testimony to transformations of the borders of the different modes of questioning whiteness and the targeted violence ‘whiteness’, but also as marking the that these processes produce through differential effects that colonialism their concatenation with a politics of continues to exact upon the bodies of ‘race’. The Borderpolitics of Whiteness people from various communities. The has become a renewed politics of intricate web of racialised relations that vengeance by processes that re- were laid bare at the Forum should be constitute their alignments via the placed and understood within the regulation of the body, across local and broader context of the complex national spaces, and across diasporic operations of colonialism which embeds and transnational formations. divisions and then thrives in these very climates. In saying this we are not The Borderpolitics of Whiteness advocating a politics of sameness or Conference, as the first official easy unities as the way forward; instead ACRAWSA Conference, brought we think that insisting on mapping the together academics, performers and various manifestations of colonial power community activists to engage in a upon different communities and their dialogue around issues pertaining to a interconnectedness is one way to move field that we believe cannot but be towards racial justice in the Australian controversial. The very terrain that the colonial landscape. We believe this to conference played out upon was and is, be a difficult and painful dialogue that ISSN 1832-3898 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2007 PALOMBO AND GIANNACOPOULOS: EDITORIAL needs to continue as a way of Forum in December. Perera’s essay negotiating, understanding, intervening meticulously maps the ways in which in and contesting colonial power in the citizenship is deployed as a form of multiple forms that it takes. Discussions internal border control and policing around the ways in which non- “across” a series of “discontinuous sites indigenous communities can engage and contexts”. She pinpoints “a hidden with the politics of racism in the context but nonetheless inexorable logic of of denied Indigenous sovereignties are territorialisation” that binds the racialised particularly urgent and need to be space of Redfern to the space of continued. Cronulla and asks that the events of Cronulla be understood in terms of this We are very privileged in this issue to relation. Without this there is an reproduce extracts of some highly obfuscation of the “sociospatial linkages poignant daily entries documenting life that sustain Sydney as a city constituted in immigration detention by Mina from by racialised and ethnicised borders Mina’s Diary and a collection of poems within a neoliberal regime that both powerfully crafted by esteemed writers recodes and reinscribes colonial Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf The Veil My demarcations, scales and categories”. Body, Tony Birch Not Our Jo b and Within this framework Perera engages Another 113 , Anita Heiss White and Black with the heterogenous effects of the Poetry Readings: Distinct Differences “watershed” of Cronulla to expose the and Ouyang Yu The Last Barrier . These “racist hierarchies and demarcations great works were selected by Dr Helen that are…constitutive of Australia as a Koukoutsis who negotiated with each nation-state”. Her detailed analysis of writer or their publishers, highlighting the the Tamworth council’s decision to purpose of this journal and of ACRAWSA. refuse resettlement to Sudanese families, These works participate in current the decision to ban the Australian flag at polemics of war, race, sovereignty, the Big Day Out, the circulation of the refugee rights and detention centres, Cronulla 2230 Board game, and the border control, religion, white Australia name changes of Governmental and its policies. Their use of literary and classificatory institutions, expose the poetic discourses extends, encourages, “new emphasis on citizenship” as “a inspires and builds up links that work to technology that aims to search out the interrupt dominant narratives on these enemy within”. This is a project that, in issues. Meanwhile, they undo colonial making and remaking the borders ‘imaginations’ that affect in multiple between Indigenous and other ways all readers of this edition. It is with racial/ethnic bodies, “extends at an their gritty critical incisiveness that official level the project of national whiteness studies must connect. purification undertaken at Cronulla Beach”. In distinct ways, the essays in this edition maintain a focus on the operations of In an essay where the intellectual labour borders and whiteness through analyses and analytical rigour of painstakingly of law, geopolitics, history, racial dissecting elaborate documents of the violence and citizenship. The edition U.S. state are palpable, Joseph opens with the articulate and critical Pugliese’s Geocorpographies of Torture essay by Suvendrini Perera, ‘Aussie Luck’: shifts the focus of the edition to the The Border Politics of Citizenship Post global business of empire and war. This Cronulla Beach , a paper first presented paper, which was originally presented as at the Borderpolitics of Communities a keynote address at the Borderpolitics 2 PALOMBO AND GIANNACOPOULOS: EDITORIAL of Whiteness Conference, unravels and global colonial project. This paper lays bare the logic that informs, enables specifically engages with the way in and effectively legalises, the torture of which the bordering of these camps Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Pugliese controlled the local shifts from the invalidates the official claim that position of non-white and white ‘object practices of torture “have a unique of labour’ to ‘political subjects’ or nature” by establishing crucial points of citizens of the nation. The essay connection between the practices of foregrounds how these Camps within torture at Abu Ghraib and the U.S.’s their specificities continued the colonial racially supremacist history, a violent techniques used against Indigenous history that continues to shape and Australians to create “white sovereignty” inform the contemporary U.S. nation. but also, as Palombo argues, “these Pugliese argues, through his incisive biopolitical and necropolitical processes analysis of the deployment of legal have been enacted to suit the ‘global’ rationales for defending torture, that aims of a certain transnational form of “torture is officially sanctioned along a sovereignty”. continuum of carefully managed intensities, punctuated by levels of pain In Nomos Basileus: The Reign of Law in a that, the reflexively disciplined torturer ‘World of Violence’, Maria ‘knows’ must not go beyond that Giannacopoulos tracks the points of defined level of intensity that will place connection between three distinct but his or her victim within the domain of legally enabled enactments of white possible death”. Therefore, officially, sovereign power. Specifically, she draws “torture really only comes into being, on excerpts from the High Court Mabo paradoxically, in the death of the judgement, Howard’s celebration of victim”. And it is precisely because of Greeks being “fully integrated” and her this violent logic, through which “Arab own experience of racial violence on a prisoners become metonymic adjuncts Sydney train, in order to contextualise of the external terrain of Iraq”, that these events in relation to the process Pugliese insists that bodies become “the that enables them, that is, ongoing ground upon which the military Indigenous dispossession. She questions operations are performed and through the claim made by scholars of whiteness which control of the colonised country is studies that Southern Europeans secured”. become “fully complicit” with Indigenous dispossession