Last week in Sydney, Australia we held the first launch of our new co-edited book Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the silence published in August 2024 by Bristol University Press.
The launch was hosted by the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University. Scholars Bronwyn Carlson, Maria Giannacopoulos, Joseph Pugliese, Nicole Watson (statement read by Noe Lumby), Andrew Brooks and Na’ama Carlin spoke briefly about their chapters. Our book was launched by Joseph Pugliese who is Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. Joseph can also be described as a class act and a wonderful human. He titled his speech: The Incantatory Power of Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies. In relation to the book Pugliese opens with:
This volume of essays at every stage marks and analyses the manner in which race and coloniality operate through what must not be seen as a paradox but, rather, as an inextricable double-bind: on the one hand, the chapters of this book insistently draw attention to the destructive impact of race and coloniality on the settler state’s targeted bodies-race always already operates on the affective, psychic, and physical materiality of the body. Simultaneously, the various authors proceed rigorously to unpack how the racialised body is necessarily enmeshed within structural and institutional relations of racial and settler colonial power that generate the power effects of both race and colonialism while simultaneously effacing the structurality of these power relations and reducing them in the process to atomised and individualistic experiences (Bargallie & Fernando 2024). The innovative power of this collection lies in how it so brilliantly negotiates this double-bind to “Unmask the Racial Contract” (Bargallie, 2020) of white supremacy that continues to interpellate and capture its targeted subjects. In the face of this racial-settler power of interpellation and captivity, the book operates as an invaluable manual that works to enable a collective politics of liberation-precisely by offering, to cite Bargallie and Fernando, “a language to identify, name and contest racist experiences” and thereby providing us with “the tools to undertake necessary work to transform the structures of white supremacy” (2024, p.2).
Read the full review here: The Incantory Power of Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies.
Pugliese, J. (2024). The Incantatory Power of Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Launch of Debbie Bargallie and Nilmini Fernando (eds.), Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence. Journal of Global Indigeneity, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.54760/001c.123772
