ABSTRACT:
\nCharges of racism levelled in the public domain\, particularly when contested\, are frequently met with the response &lsquo\;get over it&rsquo\;. Those who level the charge &ndash\; usually but not only people of colour &ndash\; are dismissed as making mountains out of molehills\, being trapped in some kind of racial paranoia\, and dwelling (in both senses of living in and brooding on) the &lsquo\;racist past&rsquo\;. While there are many important layers to this familiar discursive impasse\, in this paper I examine the specifically temporal dimensions of such claims\, situating it in a broader analysis of racialised time. In doing so I draw on the work of Alia Al-Saji\, who in her phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon\, examines the multiple ways in which racism and colonialism affix the racialised and colonised body to that of the past &ndash\; and specifically\, a closed past. This temporalisation of the racialised body \;serves not only to anachronise it\, but also to close off its projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Such a move reflects the nature of racialisation itself\, which following Al-Saji and \;Charles Mills\, \;does not just exteriorise or &lsquo\;other&rsquo\; racialised bodies\, but relies equally on a forgetting\, or a disavowal and leaving behind of this very process. The result\, I argue\, is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation\, free from the vestiges of racism&rsquo\;s history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this setting that I further argue the exhortations to &lsquo\;get over&rsquo\; racism &ndash\; looking at examples such as the ongoing contestation around \;Australia Day / Invasion Day commemorations\, and the recent controversy around (and subsequent defence of) Mark Knight&rsquo\;s cartoon depiction of Serena Williams &ndash\; are not only dangerous in their denial of racism\, but also disingenuous in the way they purport to move beyond a racially divided world\, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialised temporalities.
ORGANIZER;CN=Cathy Legg: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR