Rites of passage?

The concept of Australian democracy encompasses an assumed cultural unity where every sovereign subject possesses equal rights. Yet an assumed unity covers over the pre-existing indigeneity in order to ground this homogenous conception. As a continuing threat to the democratic foundations of Australian sovereignty, Indigenous people continue to find themselves on the fringe of a politically contingent space, where they lose the material structures that are privileged through common law. Sovereign legislations continue to uphold a fixed notion of community that relies upon a binarism that prioritises identity over difference, which denies the ongoing constitutive relations of shifting subjectivity entailing inter-subjective responsibilities. Difference, as in indigeneity, is foreclosed legislatively, in order to define and maintain the nation’s homogenous identity and its British Commonwealth roots. With a focus on the appearance of representative bodies, while hiding the power relations that materially construct systems of denial and oppression, claims for recognition, in contemporary debates regarding human rights, can reinforce an essentialised concept of an oppressed Indigenous ‘other’. Specificity regarding rights becomes compromised and oppositions emerge when tied to a base of equivalence.