Editing Moves Towards Innocense

“It is precisely by denying culpability or assuming that one is not implicated in violent relations toward others, that one is outside them, that violence can be perpetuated. Violence, especially of the liberal varieties, is often most easily perpetrated in the spaces and places where its possibility is unequivocally denounced” (Berlant, 2018, as cited in Rothberg, 2020, p.49). 

Before we continue to engage with some of the testimonies shared in the workshop, we wish to caution against the conceptualization of reconciliatory allyship in ways that facilitate ‘’moves towards innocence’’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012); the fallacy of imagining there is an easy road to reconciliation leading to superficial actions that alleviate settler guilt, but do nothing to repatriate land, or undo settler power, coloniality or privilege. Reconciliatory allyship shouldn’t be invoked to reinscribe settler virtues, it should be contemplated alongside the concepts of implication, responsibilities to unsettle settler innocence, and to inspire action (Grundy et al., 2019). The form and the possible degree of acting as allies (especially from within institutions rooted in western-based thinking) depends on the complexity of one's entanglement and the privileges one has within the institution and other interlocking socially inherited structures (see Rothberg 2020, p.87).

<span class="pop-up vista link" data-page-title="The_Becoming_Other_Vista" data-section-id="0" data-encounter-type="Vista">[[The Becoming Other Vista|Vista:"Becoming Other"]]</span>