In this episode, the co-hosts put on their smarty-pants to unpack how the term ‘disavowal’ can illuminate Asian Australians’ role in settler colonialism. Jessie Liu helps us flesh out this psychic structure–an active suppression or forgetting–through ideas of depoliticisation, class, and localisation. The hosts return to the topic of names and how, although English names help us access certain privileges, this is also an act of symbolic death and haunting.

Jessie explores how Asians’ disavowal of generational wealth maintains narratives of meritocracy and Scarlette joins in with her reflection of using the ‘first gen academic’ label. Miranda draws on Claire Jean Kim’s research to think about Asian Australians’ solidarity with other minority groups before we contemplate the difficulty of sitting with painful knowledge and heavy responsibilities.

Sources:

• ‘The Vanishing Half’ by Bennett Brit

• ‘Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism’ by Iyko Day

• ‘Asian Americans in an Antiblack World’ by Claire Jean Kim

• ‘Introduction: Public Policy and Indigenous Futures’ by Nikki Moodie and Sarah Maddison

• ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’ by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang

• ‘Introducing: settler colonial studies’ by Lorenzo Veracini

• ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’ by Patrick Wolfe

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