Reading Our ‘Destiny in the World We Have Made’: Inscriptions and Incantations of Race in the Wake of the Christchurch Massacres

Abstract

In the wake of colonial violence, how do we come to terms with its event while refusing the power exercised by these very terms? If race is an organising grammar upon which we must draw in articulating the very realities to which it consigns us, then what recourse does it leave us in disarticulating and remaking these realities? This article is a meditation on these questions in the context of the massacres at two Christchurch mosques, and the raced discourses which they occasioned. In exploring these discourses as raced, the emphasis here is on their temporal qualities: on race as the coding of the time and the place (or non-place) in history where its subjects belong. Against the legibility and transparency with which race interpellates its subjects, is there a magic in the opacity and poetics of speech through which we can rewrite our ‘destinies’ and reinvent ourselves?