Introduction: Do we really want a return to normal?

The Covid-19 pandemic—impossible to ignore—has wrought major upheavals to social and economic life. Governments in many nations responded to these upheavals with public spending programmes on vaccines and medical equipment, and financial support for businesses and workers during lockdowns and public safety mandates. Governments indeed were forced to protect economies in ways antithetical to neoliberal economic orthodoxy. It was possible, for a moment, to even think that this crisis would be the final blow to this orthodoxy which would then precipitate a space for a new and more equitable economic order. The question ‘is this the new normal’ that marked public and everyday discourse certainly suggested this possibility. At the same time, however, the desire for a ‘return to normal’ also marked these discourses. And what became immediately apparent as the pandemic wore on, is that long-established discriminatory and unjust structures remain firmly in place. The normal, in fact, never went away. With the upheaval, the only thing that has changed is that the normal discriminatory and unjust structures have become even more entrenched. We might say the new normal is even more normal. This issue can be read, in various ways, as showing the rigidity of long-established structures and that substantive change can only come through new means.

The issue opens with Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s article, ‘The white possessive’. Critically drawing on David Goldberg’s work on ‘conceptual primitives’ as a framework for considering the white appropriation of Indigenous and Black identities, Moreton-Robinson examines three cases of identity appropriation: Joseph Boyden in Canada, Rachel Dolezal in the USA, and Elizabeth Durack in Australia. The critical point about identity appropriation is that the appropriators assume identity is somehow contingent and, crucially, free in the individualist liberal sense. Identities are, in this view, merely historically contingent discursive constructs. Moreton-Robinson challenges this as a white assumption arguing that discursive constructs are materially conditioned. They are underpinned by conceptual primatives that drive epistemic formations. So rather than depthless discourses, as we find in the work of Foucault, Said, and Hall, Moreton-Robinson points to what we might call the white racial unconscious that shapes and legitimates racial identity appropriation.

In their article, ‘Dwelling in discomfort’, Poppy De Souza and Tanja Dreher take up the problem of listening as a situated practice that unsettles settler-colonial relations and opens a trajectory to just futures. Paying careful attention to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, De Souza and Dreher contend that the non-indigenous responses to the statement should not be situated within liberal deliberative and democratic frameworks. Such frameworks tend to situate actors in terms of individual rights. The problem here is that success depends upon how well they are spoken within the terms that the listener can hear. In the case of the state, this means speaking in the terms established and recognised by the state. The onus is thus on the speaker, claiming rights, rather than on how the state listens. De Souza and Dreher propose that the main emphasis should be upon listening to the uncomfortable truths of settler-colonial violence upon Australia’s First Peoples. Dwelling in the discomfort of this truth opens a space for the co-dwelling of Australia’s peoples.

David Eades takes up how asylum seekers in Australian’s detention centres navigate the brutal reality of their incarceration. Looking specifically at visits spaces in Sydney, where detainees meet with outside support people. These spaces, as Eades shows through interviews with detainees, offered hope in the context of the dire situation. Joesephine Biglin also explores and expands on the experience of asylum seekers in the UK through photographs. Taking a visual approach to borders, through the photographic self-representations of the study’s participants, Biglin finds that legal status and a sense of belonging, being at home in one’s space, do not correspond. While borders demarcate here as opposed to there, suggesting this space as opposed to that, the participants sense of being at home is complex. This complexity, Biglin maintains, troubles state policy such as the UK’s ‘Safe return review’ policy, which priortizes a particular form of legal belonging. And Nicolas Hauman in ‘Heavenly Bodies: Scientific Racism and the Taxonomy of Extraterrestrial Life’ draws a connection between the imaginary construction of alien beings in literature and philosophy and orientalist discourses of othering.

The issue also includes Tarik Kochi’s detailed review article of Francis Fukuyama’s ideas, ‘A Dangerous Text: Francis Fukuyama’s Mischaracterisation of Identity, Recognition and Right-Wing Nationialism’, and two book reviews: Matthew Leep’s review of Raffi Youatt’s Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States; and Peter Odak’s review of Mari Ruti’s Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue.

Many thanks to the reviewers for this issue. Your academic labour is vitally important and much appreciated. Many thanks to Paul Kirkham for help with formatting documents, and Anne Begg, a fellow editor of Borderlands, for help with proofing and holding together the admin aspects of the journal.