Abstract
The article witnesses encounters in Australia, many centered in Aboriginal Australian contexts, and asks what arts-based research methods can offer to intercultural contact. It offers a meditation on decolonizing methodologies and the use of poetry and performance by a white Western subject in disability culture. The argument focuses on productive unknowability, on finding machines that respectfully align research methods and cultural production at the site of encounter.
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Notes
- 1.
There are very specific ethical issues here. I participated in the 2010 conference on disability and development in Darwin, a conference created in collaboration with AusAID, the Australian government’s development money grantor, and other funders for development projects. Many of the presenters were there to report on projects made possible with these grant monies, and were looking to renew their funding. Thus, the papers given were not exactly interest-free (whatever that means), but fitted their ways of organizing knowledge to sophisticated ways of reading situations in the terms that grantors had set up. And since disability-responsive development, building access into projects created through AusAID money, is a core and welcome issue, “disability” became a very legible category in these papers.
I could analyze what I witnessed, and talk about some of the talk that went on out in the corridors, and I could make complex some of the ways that disability mapped onto lived experiences in some of the South Pacific island nations, for instance. But to do so would be to endanger the legibility of some of these projects, and I would undermine the self-representation of the ambassadors of these communities. Here is one of the many places where I need to be attentive to the web of privilege and the different use-values of scholarship out there, in their intersection with (post)colonial framings. Sometimes, it is a good option to mark silence as a place-holder for what could be said.
- 2.
These issues came to the front when I wrote about Arnieville, a 2010 Californian disability activism tent village (Kuppers 2011a), and the topic of a chapter by Taylor in this volume: while I am privy to a lot of information about the internal politics of the encampment, I chose to publish a much more general account. The reasons for this are complex, and include personal relationship enmeshments, but also thoughts about a critic’s responsibility and the (under)representation of disability-led political labor in public.
- 3.
There are places where this kind of work happens, in collaboration, in long-term duration, and in participatory action research where the “researched” community’s interests are firmly kept in mind. Examples include this Aotearoan collaborative research on Maori understanding of what in English is termed blindness, and what is here figured as Ngāti Kāpo, i.e. as a cultural formation. In it, the collaborators write:
In this research, the researchers and Ngāti Kāpo o Aotearoa Inc. viewed the Treaty of Waitangi from a Māori world view. In doing so, the research team upheld its centrality with respect to research methodology and analysis, effective partnership building with non-Māori, social equity and justice, and most importantly to Māori aspirations to be Māori and selfdetermining. (Higgins et al. 2011, p. 10)
- 4.
Material I looked at, and people I met, include Jennifer Martiniello (who identifies as of Arrernte, Chinese and Anglo-Celtic descent) and her edited collections Talking Ink from Ochre (2002) and Writing Us Mob (2000); Wijadjuri woman and Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies research fellow Jeanine Leane and her 2010 collection Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD) 1887–1961; and Bidjara and Wakaman woman and poet Yvette Holt, author of Anonymous Premonition (2008). I also benefited from discussions with Alisa Duff, who presented on “The Politics of Dancing: issues in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance” as part of the Text and Texture seminar convened by Jeanine Leane.
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Editors’ Postscript
If you liked Chap. 5 by Petra Kuppers, and are interested in reading more about performance and dance in disability studies, we recommend Chap. 7 “Scenes and Encounters, Bodies and Abilities: Devising Performance with Cyrff Ystwyth” by Margaret Ames and Chap. 24 “If Disability is a dance, who is the choreographer?” Neil Marcus, Pamela Block and Devva Kasnitz. Chapter 8, “Artistic Therapeutic Treatment, Colonialism & Spectacle: A Brazilian Tale” by Marta Simões Peres, Francine Albiero de Camargo, José Otávio P. e Silva, and Pamela Block focuses on performance, disability studies in the global south, and legacies of colonialism. If you are interested in disability and occupation in Australia, read Chap. 13 “Why Bother Talking? On Having Cerebral Palsy and Speech Impairment: Preserving and Promoting Oral Communication Through Occupational Community and Communities of Practice” by Rick Stoddart and David Turnbull, and Chap. 22 “Blindness and Occupation: Personal Observations and Reflections” by Rikki Chaplin. Other chapters focusing on disability in the global south and legacies of colonialism include: Chapter 19, “Crab and Yoghurt” by Tobias Hecht, Chap. 20, and Occupying Disability in Brazil” by Anahi Guedes de Mello, Pamela Block, and Adriano Henrique Nuernberg.
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Kuppers, P. (2016). Landings: Decolonizing Disability, Indigeneity and Poetic Methods. In: Block, P., Kasnitz, D., Nishida, A., Pollard, N. (eds) Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9984-3_5
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