In the Market for Reconciliation? In Reconciliation and Pedagogy

It is in the light of these events (and in the light of Australia\u27s new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd\u27s opening of parliament on 12 February 2008 with an apology to the Stolen Generations) that we frame our arguments in this chapter. In the first instance, we want to discuss how reconciliation in a dialogic and material sense is susceptible to the economic interests and political ideologies of the state… Here we argue that it might be useful to take a closer look at the political and economic forces that propel national reconciliation processes in the remaking of race and nation (see Marx 1998). We argue that, unless the deep-seated entitlements of Aboriginal sovereignty and land justice are settled, projects for reconciliation can only but skim the surface of a genuine rapprochement between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. It is of course in this sense that the collective failure to recognize the embeddedness of Aboriginal disentitlement to the material interests of the modern Australian state is also to make the liberal error of seeing racism as abhorrent to modern nation making rather than as fundamental to it (Langton 1999; Gilmore 2002).https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_books/1071/thumbnail.jp