The Poetic as Pragmatic: Experiments in Compassionate Activism

• In Event: What Are the Aesthetics of Justice?

Abstract

Taiaiake Alfred claims that “the bold and unchallenged white arrogance and racial prejudice against indigenous peoples…is the first and most important target of action” for decolonization (2005: 60). What forms of action might transform these normalizing logics and sensibilities of settler-colonialism, when they are both invisible to settler communities and impervious to conventional strategies of protest or argument? Field work with over twenty practitioners across therapy, education, performance and conflict mediation – four fields that expressly foster the conditions for listening to what is challenging to hear and yet are currently written out of political theorizing – indicates that while counter to conventional activist approaches, meeting entrenched views and resistances with receptivity can prove a highly potent catalyst for transformation. Yet such ‘poetic’ approaches present real difficulty to the task of translation to highly pragmatic and urgent sites of activism. This paper reflects on recent experiments in applying such strategies to an overtly activist project of transforming racism towards Māori expressed in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Tauiwi/Tautoko project takes a novel approach for ActionStation, a non-profit crowd-sourced campaigning organization that typically relies on petitions, demonstrations, and information-dissemination to provoke structural change. This project is conceived as a ‘compassionate army’ of Pākehā (settler) volunteers who, informed and supported by Māori, combat online anti-Māori racism not through argumentation or opposition, but through receptivity, curiosity, and acknowledgment of complexity and uncertainty. In light of collaborating on this project’s four iterations across the country over 2019, this paper explores the challenges of enacting this counter-intuitive approach to activism, as well as whether, in such contexts, the poet and pragmatist, the prefigurative and disruptive might prove more aligned than we typically conceive.

Author

• Emily Beausoleil, Victoria University of Wellington