Post-cultural hospitality: settler-native-migrant encounters.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Smith, Jo

Contemporary settler states can be characterized as conjunctural formations that attempt to address the demands of the historical legacies of colonization at the same time as dealing with the present-time and future-oriented imperatives of transnational and international global forces. (1) Indigenous collectivities' calls for social justice challenge the legitimacy of settler-state law at the same time as global economic and cultural flows erode the sovereignty of the nation-state. As a recent special issue of Postcolonial Studies entitled 'Unsettled States' makes clear, these competing conditions (of past and future played out in the heady culture of the everyday) invite settler states to address the question of:

... how to exit with grace, justice and humility a formation that shows terminal signs of collapsing under the weight of its own exclusions, illogics and undecidabilities ... when western geopolitical powers are intensifying, rather than loosening, their efforts to salvage certainty, predictability and centrality in a rapidly re-configuring global landscape. (2) In contemporary settler states the need for a strong (certain and predictable) national presence on the global market is undermined by intra-national concerns that contest the basis of contemporary settler governmentality. In light of these global economic imperatives and intra-national concerns, strategies of reconciliation instigated by nations such as Australia and South Africa take on new meanings. That is to say, strategies such as the recognition of historical injustices and the attempt by governments to reconcile indigenous claims within the contemporary context are ostensibly discourses of social justice. Yet they are also attempts by a once-colonial nation-state to decide the undecidable (to be done with the responsibility of a settler past), so as to attain a sense of national unity for the future. This is the surest expression of the persistence of settler sovereignty: to make a decision on how differences between settler and native collectivities will be negotiated, maintained, and (ultimately) overcome.

Addressing recent claims to indigenous sovereignty within Australia and New Zealand, the editors of Postcolonial Studies remind us of how strategies of reconciliation tend to conceal the 'differently constituted and positioned socio-cultural systems and practices' that inform competing claims to social power. (3) Indeed, the underlying contradiction of such discourses of reconciliation can be seen in the ways in which such rhetoric and strategies can serve to mask the majority's ability to impose norms and regulations on another collectivity. What of these undecidables? What of these differing socio-cultural systems? Echoing the recent work of Fuyuki Kurasawa, the editors suggest that, in light of these socio-cultural differences, the presuppositions underpinning western social theory and the settler state (including what constitutes social justice, cultural tradition, modernity, rights and sovereignty) must undergo a thorough cross-cultural critique. What is at stake within the settler state is more a 'vexed politics of culture (rather than a politically correct but ethically evacuated "cultural politics")', which is to say that whatever normalizing force prevails, this force must be opened up through perpetual critique. (4) The settler state is thus the limit case of western social theory as the urgencies of indigenous claims to social power (and justice) unsettle orthodox intellectual, methodological and theoretical practices, thus consistently urging the production of mobile theoretical concepts with which the movements of social power might be traced.

The special issue of Postcolonial Studies explores settler-native encounters within Australia and New Zealand as a means to demonstrate these 'unsettling' intra-national tensions. Yet, as the above quote from its editorial implies, the conjunctural characteristics of the settler state also include interactions with trans- and international 'western geopolitical powers' and, by extension, global flows of capital. These international issues are not addressed in the special issue, which focuses more on settler-native encounters. Other intra-national concerns, such as those socio-cultural differences introduced by immigrant collectivities, are also occluded. How can one pursue an examination of a 'vexed politics of culture' of the contemporary settler state without considering migrant national subjects and global economic and cultural flows? I suspect that one can do so when the pressing question of indigenous sovereignty prioritizes the effects of settler power rather than processes of globalization, and calls for the wrongs of the colonial past to be healed before multicultural policies can be considered.

As Australian cultural politics has demonstrated, policies of multiculturalism and the rhetoric accompanying them have threatened the recognition of Aboriginal Australian sovereignty. However, do we not risk a certain ethical negligence when we bracket off considerations of the multicultural and the global when discussing the unsettled nature of contemporary settler states? While the question of a politics of western culture (and the social theories underpinning these cultural formations) is no doubt a complex and vexed research agenda, perhaps it is equally imperative not to leave unexamined the many socio-cultural systems and practices operating alongside those of the settler-native. This discussion plays host to the idea that the 'vexed politics of culture' of the contemporary settler state must include discussions of indigenous and migrant encounters beyond those of the settler-native type. Indeed, beginning from the point of multiple differences (settler-native-migrant) suggests that such a politics of culture must be post-cultural in its focus and alert to the imperatives of global capital in the production and dissemination of cultural identities. Given these conjunctural dynamics, the settler state is unusually positioned to develop strategies and models of cross-cultural encounter that unsettle prevailing intellectual and epistemological practices.

The Bicultural Settler State and Multicultural Discourse

The competing tensions of past, present and future are sharply demarcated within the nation-state of Aotearoa/New Zealand. A treaty signed between the British Crown and New Zealand Maori conditions contemporary cultural politics. At the same time, the geopolitics of the country (its small population and history as an export culture) ensures its dependency on global capital. These tensions can be framed by the competing discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism. Aotearoa/New Zealand (a place name that literally demonstrates the settler/native divide) pursues a politics of biculturalism which attempts to honour the Treaty of Waitangi, and thus to 'exit with grace' prior forms of colonial governmentality. Yet the bicultural nature of this politics must contend with a de facto multiculturalism, which characterizes the culture of the everyday and highlights the perceived exclusionary nature of biculturalism. Writing in the context of national television culture, Kothari, Pearson and Zuberi note:

Notwithstanding the degree, intensity and implementation of an actual partnership, official bicultural rhetoric effectively means that Maori bicultural rights supersede the multicultural rights of immigrants. Therefore, New Zealand is a place in which multiculturalism as policy has been explicitly deferred. Nevertheless it lurks in the quotidian shadows as a de facto reality. (5) While bicultural rhetoric within the mainstream (settler-structured) public sphere does indeed appear to preclude multiculturalism (and we shall return to this issue in a later section), the de facto multicultural reality of Aotearoa/New Zealand often feeds political rhetoric celebrating the 'quotidian shadows' of the contemporary nation.

As I shall argue, discourses of multiculturalism attempt to assert a pragmatic response to global flows of labour, people and resources, and are at times at odds with the more historical concerns that policies of biculturalism reflect. Whenever these two terms circulate, they do so at the service of a nation-building agenda and involve some form of identity positioning within the categories of Maori (or tangata whenua), Pakeha (a settler identity distinct from European identity and in relation to Maori), or migrant. Discourses of biculturalism and multiculturalism rarely enable the possibility of simultaneous identity positions across these categories. Such identity categories are embedded in a history of meanings that can never quite express the constantly shifting parameters of identification characterizing the everyday. These ill-fitting categories contribute to the 'unsettled' nature of this settler state and disrupt governmental drives to be 'post-settler'. The limits of these concepts and the rhetoric surrounding these terms (Pakeha , Maori, Migrant) bring into relief the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning cultural identities and throw into question the basis for collective political action within the settler nation. That is to say, the contemporary context of Aotearoa/New Zealand exemplifies the vexed question of a settler-native-migrant politics of culture.

The ontologico-epistemological dimensions of bicultural and multicultural discourses, as concepts designating the cut and shape of Aotearoa/New Zealand political culture, generate notions of belonging in at least three ways: as dependant upon a state of injury (where Maori are the victims of historical violence); as derived from a willful forgetting of the past or as an economy of guilt and debt (the heirs to colonial settlement, Pakeha); or as a condition premised on the benevolence of the state (Migrant subjects). Each approach fails to provide an affirmative...