Abstract
On 13 February 2008, the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, on behalf of the Parliament of Australia, offered an apology to Australia’s Indigenous population for the forced removal of Aboriginal children (often referred to as the Stolen Generation) from their families. Four months later, on 11 June 2008, the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, also issued an apology on behalf of Canadians for the Indian Residential Schools system in Canada. In Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Canadian and Australian Literature and Film Beyond the Victim Paradigm, Hanna Teichler uses these two apologies as a point of departure for reflecting on the glibness of reconciliation discourses in settler-colonial countries. In the book, Teichler is critical of the very voguish ‘politics of regret’ that sweeps across many post-conflict societies. She joins many other scholars to show how public apologies are often performative and – to use her term of choice – carnivalesque.
In the first part of the book (Introduction and Chapter 1), Teichler lays out her conceptual framework by engaging with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque. Bakhtin, Teichler points out, formulates the carnivalesque as a subversive literary mode that employs humour, mimicry and other kinds of spectacle to challenge hegemonic literary style and tradition. Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque follows the logic of a carnival where, in the name of festivities and merriments, people of different extractions, classes and cultures break through ideological and socio-political barriers and come together as one. However, when the carnival is over, everything returns to normal and the status quo is restored. Teichler also engages with the work of Teresa Godwin Phelps to show how the logic of the carnivalesque applies in the context of truth and reconciliation commissions. She employs the carnivalesque as a lens ‘to approach ways in which Canadian and Australian social relations and transcultural identities are negotiated’ (p. 119).
Using this carnivalesque lens, Teichler is quick to point out that ‘reconciliation discourses in Australia and Canada are at the same time enabling and problematic’ (p. 116). They are enabling because of the way they counter structural silences in histories of violence and bring marginalised grievances into the discursive centre. At the same time, they are problematic because, in the context of Australia and Canada, they often reproduce and perpetuate Indigenous victimhood. That is, despite benevolent intentions and righteous identity-political agendas, ‘the work of the truth commissions in both countries has run the risk of reiterating the Indigenous-as-victim template’ (p. 410). In the same vein, Teichler opines that while public apologies temporarily reverse power hierarchies, ‘they rely on overly schematic identity portfolios – and “us” and “them” logic – that simplify the complex and ambiguous interrelation of historical and contemporary transcultural identities’ (p. 31). In other words, Teichler is of the opinion that public apologies and reconciliation discourses often fall into the trap of essentialism as they create a settler versus indigenous binary logic while overlooking the ‘complexities in-between’. Teichler then suggests that reconciliation is, in and of itself, carnivalesque because when the performance of official apology is over, ‘the playful exploration of resistance of elites ends and the social hierarchy returns to the status quo ante’ (p. 29). She also explains that the carnivalesque space of reconciliation is always sanctioned and (pre)determined by political agents who act on behalf of the state.
In the second chapter of the book, Teichler zeroes in on Rudd and Harper’s apology speeches and uses a critical discourse analysis framework to show how ‘bending knees’ and ‘saying sorry’ are ‘scripted performances aimed at triggering affects’ (p. 142). She shows how the repetitive use of the passive voice in the speeches renders perpetrators’ crime structural and not personal. In other words, the apology speeches did not only tone down the scale of violence perpetrated on Indigenous communities by White settlers, they also obscured the perpetrator’s subject position and framed colonial violence as a natural and ahistorical calamity that befell indigenous people. Teichler explains that in Harper’s speech, there is an implied image of Canada as a country that needs to ceaselessly produce an Other on whom it must dispense benevolence. She also notes that Rudd’s speech romanticises the power of apology and frames ‘saying sorry’ as the noble way of placating Indigenous grievances. Teichler concludes this chapter by reiterating the obvious problems with political apologies which is that they are staged, dressed in static identity binaries and are often used to legitimise the status quo instead of putting an end to them. At the end of this chapter, Teichler also invites readers to consider why apologies are often imagined as atonement for the (mis)deeds past, not an act of repentance for the violence in the present.
In Chapters 3–5, Teichler turns to films and literature from Australia and Canada in order to examine the often-overlooked complexities of reconciliation discourses. She believes that ‘the space of fiction’ or ‘the sphere of the imaginary’ mirrors, more adequately, the potentials and limits of the discourse of reconciliation as a discourse of the carnivalesque. She notes that the ‘carnivalesque proves a valuable category to approach identity politics in fiction’ and that all the films and novels analysed in the book ‘employ some version of the carnivalesque in order to make their political points regarding memory’ (p. 36). While the literary and film analysis part of the book might not have delivered as much as it promised, Teichler’s reading of texts such as Gail Jones’ Sorry, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, Kim Scott’s Benang, Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia is very instructive. It is with these texts that she makes readers see how the carnivalesque is not only performative but also subversive. While it is performative because of its scriptedness, it is subversive because of its timed role reversal. Put differently, while the apology speeches are evidently performative because they play into a national script, the literary and filmic texts are subversive in the way they complicate identity politics and open up the space for transcultural negotiations.
Teichler notes that some of the texts (especially Sorry) are, in a sense, a literary apology because of the way they set out to bring hitherto marginalised indigeneity to the centre. But this is where the paradox of the carnivalesque sets in. Despite their subversive tendencies, the authors of these well-meaning literary and filmic texts often end up carnivalizing identity positions and reinstating certain stereotypes and orthodoxies. For example, in Chapter 3, Teichler shows how Sorry unintentionally glorifies the settler trauma while Three Day Road ends up annihilating the main character who has the potential to undo uneven power relations and forge a transcultural liaison. Drawing from all the texts analysed in the book, Teichler concludes that ‘what was meant to be a gesture of respect – centering on experiences and representations of indigenous suffering – may eventually have re-enacted the entirely colonial trope of the childish native and the native as a child’ (p. 94). In essence, beyond the Bakhtinian idea of the literary form as carnivalesque, Teichler’s analysis suggests that representation itself is and can be carnivalesque.
Teichler, in the concluding chapter, raises some important provocations. She asks us to consider how ‘reconciliation remains curiously connected with the nation as the framework in which and through which new relations with Indigenous populations can be imagined’ (p. 24). She even suggests the limit of the nation-state in the ways in which reconciliation discourses are framed as she writes that the politics of regret in Canada and Australia ‘fortify the nation-frame and exclude claims of indigenous self-government because they presuppose national cohesion as the goal’ (p. 24). In view of that, Teichler strongly argues for transculturality as a way out of the reconciliatory impasse in Australia and Canada. She suggests that a multicultural approach can redeem ceremonious politics of regrets in Australia and Canada. But one wonders if transculturality itself is not carnivalesque and if it is not likely to do more harm to Indigenous people’s strife for sovereignty and self-determination. One also wonders whether Teichler is not too optimistic about the potential of transculturality in forging reconciliation. What exactly is reconciliation without reparations and expropriation of stolen lands? Do public apologies and truth and reconciliation commissions necessarily do the same thing conceptually and practically? Are our vocabularies of reconciliation limited and implicated in the continued violence meted out to victim groups? Teichler partly answers some of these questions in her concluding chapter by noting that reconciliation is a messy affair and is often ambiguous in nature and scope. And this leads to her final thesis and conclusion that ‘tangible changes cannot be brought about by the politics of regret alone’ (p. 409).