Rudd cribs off of Povinelli, meets unanimous acclaim

I was lucky enough to be in Australia for the Australian Government’s historic “apology to aboriginal peoples”:http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?ID=2770337&TABLE=HANSARDR&TARGET and just got done teaching it in my political anthropology class after having read Beth Povinelli’s “The State of Shame” a few weeks earlier. The similarity between Povinelli’s epigrammatic voicing of white settler guilt and Rudd’s apology is striking. I thought I’d throw it out here just by way of a fun contrast.

I know I have hurt you. But I want to make (it) up to you, repair the rupture, bridge the rift between us, heal the pain that I have caused. I want us to imagine a place where the possibility of our hurting each other does not exist. Where we can each be our different selves without shame, without fear, without alienation. True partners in peace. A world of brothers and sisters. A world of recognition and enhancement. This is the right thing to do: to heal, to move on, to found and never a New Society

versus (edited)

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written. We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

I am not sure what to make of this overlap, except to say that Povinelli got it right?

Blog post,
Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

6 thoughts on “Rudd cribs off of Povinelli, meets unanimous acclaim”

  3. Um, where’s the critique part? Or is that implied in some projected ironic framing on Povinelli’s part, her projection of the discourse of the Lacanian Subject Supposed to Apologize?

    Just trying to figure out how, and to whom, this matters.

  4. Hey Rex, Povinelli was ironically voicing Keating (see, e.g., his Redfern speech). Rudd is just picking up Keating left off twelve years ago. In the interim, John Howard poisoned the national discourse and moved away from ideas of indigenous self-determination to such an extent that a phrase like “these our fellow Australians” could bring tears of relief even to the most cynical of eyes.

    Your post highlights how the liberal rhetorics that Povinelli critiqued are now back on the public stage in Australia in surprisingly unchanged forms. The question seems to be: what difference has a decade of illiberalism and anti-multiculturalism made to critiques of liberalism?

  5. I’m fascinated by the critique of liberalism from a different angle: unlike “exotic” ideologies like Nazism or Limbaugh-style conservatism, liberalism is vanishingly close to the political ideology that the SAA (standard average academic) in a US humanities or social science department tends to hold.

    Or at least, if you ask such a person to articulate an actual political theory different from liberalism, you don’t usually get anything very compelling. I wonder about the connection between this lack of a parallax view and the oddly vacuous nature of the U of Chicagos’s the Late Liberalism Project, which looks like some kind of weird unbuilt ghost town?

    http://genderstudies.uchicago.edu/projects/project_archives.shtml

  6. Also there is the delightful, and forensically reliable, Rex Spelling Mistake:
    “to heal, to move on, to found and never a New Society” indeed!

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