What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence
What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Pluto Journals
2024-01-01
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| Series: | State Crime |
| Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/statecrime.12.2.0187 |
| _version_ | 1797283696412196864 |
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| author | Sunera Thobani |
| author_facet | Sunera Thobani |
| author_sort | Sunera Thobani |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of regret are reshaping Canadian national culture, most pronouncedly with the apologies for the Indian Residential School System (CBC News 2008a; McIntyre 2017) and the Komagata Maru (CBC News 2008b; Trudeau 2016). While Public Inquiries and Royal Commissions have long served as state responses to political mobilization, deployment of the machinery of regret has fast become the predictable response to accusations of atrocities, including genocide, enslavement and racial violence. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on violence, colonial in the case of Fanon (1961), law in that of Benjamin (1996), I examine the apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples and South-Asian diasporic communities by the Canadian state. Locating these pronouncements in the histories of violence they index, I demonstrate how such apologies function as techniques of violence that advance settler power structures and narratives of nationhood. My argument here is that apologies are themselves acts of violence which rework histories of brutalization to meet the political destabilizations of the present. Apologies thus reorganize the racial violence of settler societies, drawing sections of subjugated populations into waging this violence and, in the process, derail resurgent politics of decolonization, abolitionism and anti-racism. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T17:35:34Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-efc198458ba5422192e054d2a10af560 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2046-6056 2046-6064 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T17:35:34Z |
| publishDate | 2024-01-01 |
| publisher | Pluto Journals |
| record_format | Article |
| series | State Crime |
| spelling | doaj.art-efc198458ba5422192e054d2a10af5602024-03-02T17:00:20ZengPluto JournalsState Crime2046-60562046-60642024-01-0112218720510.13169/statecrime.12.2.0187What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State ViolenceSunera Thobani0Professor, University of British Columbia.What do apologies apologize for? More precisely, what do the apologies regularly pronounced by states for some atrocity or other actually accomplish? This question animates my article. State apologies became an integral element of global political culture in the early 21st century. These politics of regret are reshaping Canadian national culture, most pronouncedly with the apologies for the Indian Residential School System (CBC News 2008a; McIntyre 2017) and the Komagata Maru (CBC News 2008b; Trudeau 2016). While Public Inquiries and Royal Commissions have long served as state responses to political mobilization, deployment of the machinery of regret has fast become the predictable response to accusations of atrocities, including genocide, enslavement and racial violence. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s and Walter Benjamin’s ideas on violence, colonial in the case of Fanon (1961), law in that of Benjamin (1996), I examine the apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples and South-Asian diasporic communities by the Canadian state. Locating these pronouncements in the histories of violence they index, I demonstrate how such apologies function as techniques of violence that advance settler power structures and narratives of nationhood. My argument here is that apologies are themselves acts of violence which rework histories of brutalization to meet the political destabilizations of the present. Apologies thus reorganize the racial violence of settler societies, drawing sections of subjugated populations into waging this violence and, in the process, derail resurgent politics of decolonization, abolitionism and anti-racism.https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/statecrime.12.2.0187 |
| spellingShingle | Sunera Thobani What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence State Crime |
| title | What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence |
| title_full | What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence |
| title_fullStr | What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence |
| title_full_unstemmed | What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence |
| title_short | What Do Apologies Apologize for? Rearrangements of State Violence |
| title_sort | what do apologies apologize for rearrangements of state violence |
| url | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/statecrime.12.2.0187 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT sunerathobani whatdoapologiesapologizeforrearrangementsofstateviolence |