Elizabeth Povinelli is one of the most influential anthropologists and critical theorists in the arts globally. Her writing, teaching and art-making (as part of the Karrabing Film Collective) puts forward a vital critique of late liberalism, toxic settler colonialism and the worldview used to justify them. For this study session long-time Arika friend Mijke van der Drift will be asking Beth to share some of her thinking, maybe including how:

The catastrophe we are facing is not something to come, just over the horizon of current social and environmental collapse, but an ancestral catastrophe, both past and present, that has been happening to racialized and indigenous peoples for centuries.

In order to legitimate the violences visited upon those peoples, a Western worldview of possessive individualism emerged, which differentiates between things with or without agency, or what counts as life. Anything measured and found wanting against this worldview: non-life, land, the less-than-human (including racialised and indigenous peoples) is then open to exploitation, extraction, enslavement, or death. But this is only one worldview, based in a very specific history. Others exist: including the ‘analytics of existence’ that indigenous people like Beth’s friends and family in Karrabing practice.

To divert the force of anti-colonial struggle against the total violence this worldview justifies, the cunning of late liberalism has been to treat critiques of colonial capitalism as if what the oppressed want more than survival is recognition from the oppressor.

In trying to unpick the colonial worldview mentioned above, critical thought often engages with Indigenous analytics of existence through the lens of ‘entanglement’. But entanglement isn’t a very useful tool, unless it addresses within it the unequal distribution of power within an entangled existence amidst the ongoing catastrophe of colonialism, capitalism, extraction, property and the human. Our politics is only useful if it contributes to an alternative distribution of powers, so that such forms of existence or ways of being otherwise can endure.

Elizabeth is also participating in The Ancestral Present event as part of Karrabing Film Collective on Saturday 16 November.