Burnett, S., Ahmed, N., Matthews, T.-D. et al. (2 more authors) (2024) Indigenous resurgence, collective ‘reminding’, and insidious binaries: a response to Verbuyst’s ‘settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past’. Critical Discourse Studies. ISSN 1740-5904
Abstract
This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, we believe it to be a problematic category, especially in Western knowledge production about Indigenous people. Our reasons are that the term conflates the use of history with its recovery, unfairly maligns Indigenous knowledge keepers as self-serving and uninterested in the truth, and introduces an insidious binary which has unwelcome discursive effects, in that longer chains of equivalence ultimately place Indigenous storying and knowledge keeping on the other side of an epistemological divide from “proper” history-writing.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivative License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0). |
Keywords: | Therapeutic history, indigenous resurgence, South Africa, Khoisan, memory, memorialisation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > Performance and Cultural Industries (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) AH/R005354/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 15 Aug 2024 10:26 |
Last Modified: | 15 Aug 2024 10:26 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/17405904.2024.2376621 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:216140 |