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Differential Dispossession and the Rise of (European) White Indigeneity: Carisolo, Italy and Karrabing, Australia for example.

This talk examines what Povinelli has been calling the European White Counterreformation. No longer able to anchor themselves in the presupposed superiority of European Christianity and capitalism, white nativists in Europe and the colonial diaspora search for new moorings in their own premodern heritage. But this search often obscures the social and ecological fractures European invasions wrought. Europe can try to find its own internal Indian, but it cannot erase the uneven sedimentations of care and abuse. The results are the men, women, and children arriving from elsewhere onto their shores and the xenophobic rhetoric meeting them. This talk discusses this White Counterreformation from the perspective of  Rising Seas | Melting Glaciers. Rising Seas | Melting Glaciers is a project that pivots between two ecological disruptions, namely melting glaciers and rising tides, and two political historical forms and fates of colonial dispossession, namely the destruction of village/family-based commons in Trentino in 1805 and the invasion of Karrabing lands in the coastal land of the Northern Territory, Australia, in 1869. We are not interested in a comparative project. The point is not to demonstrate how my ancestral clans in Carisolo and my Indigenous colleagues’ geographical relations at Mabaluk/Bamayak were the same or different before the forces of settler colonialism slammed into them. It is  to demonstrate the ongoing conditions of geontopower as the ecological catastrophes begun in colonialism start seeping into European soils.