Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022. xvii, 260 pp. (Maps.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824889975.
Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia (the designation chosen by the Kanak independents and the author herself): two different island histories and colonial structures, in some respects difficult to compare, but both sharing a penal and settlement colonization, and a heavy imperialist mining exploitation that continues to this day. One has been independent for more
than a century, and the other is inscribed in a process of decolonization and progressive acquisition of autonomy, the result of a long struggle by the Kanak independence movement.
Angélique Stastny, a French researcher with a PhD in political science from the University of Melbourne, accomplishes a unique research project with this book: a comparative political analysis of how historical knowledge is produced and transmitted in the school systems of two neighbouring settler colonial societies. To do so, she analyzes curricula (part 1), the content of history textbooks (part 2), and teachers’ strategies in reinforcing or bridging voluntary historical silences (part 3). She also uses numerous interviews conducted with history teachers in Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia.
This monumental research project shows how colonial power is reflected and perpetuated in the transmission, or in most cases silencing, of local colonial history. The author coins the expression “settlers’ regimes of ignorance” to emphasize the instrumental regime of nescience that has been imposed on the historiography of colonial relations between settlers and natives in the two countries, preventing genuine decolonization. Among the historical aspects ignored in the curricula in Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia that she mentions: indigenous-non-European settler relations, the word “war” to refer to colonial conflicts, and the question of indigenous sovereignty (chapter 2). More specifically, in Kanaky/New Caledonia, despite the French policy of contextualization in 2012, there is no trace in the curriculum of the inter-world-war years and the evolution of the independence movement culminating in the historical period known as the “Evénements” (1984–1988). This historical omission, she explains, is aggravated when one also considers the removal in 2018, the year of the first self-determination referendum, of the 1917 war from the curriculum.
Regarding the history textbooks examined in both countries, Stastny devotes the fifth chapter to three principles on which she believes the book’s contents were constituted: the externalization of colonial violence, the fixed categorization, and the co-opting strategies. She in particular emphasizes how indigenous people are stereotyped and colonial violence silenced. Among the assimilation strategies included in Australian textbooks, for example, indigenous anti-colonial struggle and Black power activism are rendered invisible in the reformulation of a democratic process of recognition of civil rights by the nation-state. This could be viewed as a soft power strategy, in which Aboriginal people are stripped of their agency, and it is instead transferred to the political agents and institutions that implemented these “reconciliation policies,” then passed off as democratic readjustments in the linear progress of nation-building.
Is it therefore the teachers who have to take on the weight of critically filling the many historical gaps? It would seem so, according to the results of the author’s research, who in the sixth chapter reports extracts from interviews she had with history teachers in both countries. But not all teachers (the vast majority of whom are non-indigenous) agree to move off the track, some expressly choosing to follow the curriculum as closely as possible, like technicians. In the seventh and final chapter, Stastny also raises an important issue: the possible collaboration between schools and indigenous people in the educational process. She shows how in both Australia and Kanaky/New Caledonia this relationship is complicated by a variety of reasons, including institutional rigidity and dogmatic teaching, ignorance of indigenous spaces and protocols, teacher turnover, assimilation policies, and student disengagement.
The strength of this book lies in having successfully accomplished the ambitious project of comparing what is known and especially not known in Australian and Caledonian schools about their respective colonial histories. The material collected is of fundamental importance in realizing that we are faced with an “institutionalized, colonial ignorance that maintains political authority and societal arrangements in abiding by the settler colonial logic of elimination” (211). In conclusion, the picture offered by the author is not the most optimistic: in her postcolonial read of Australian and Caledonian school systems, there seems to be no hope for a real institutional decolonization of historical knowledge. However, a glimmer of hope can be found in the resistance and strategies implemented every day by some teachers.
A topic that Stastny only superficially addresses, by her own admission, is the ongoing refusal of indigenous communities to engage in these school systems that continue to marginalize their voices and reframe colonial history. Further ethnographic analysis of the reasons for this apparent rejection would have enriched the comparison and probably shown the complexity of the decolonization process in these two highly politicized territories even more. In Kanak society, to give an example, not everyone has the right to tell the story; there is a hierarchy and genealogy to be respected, which could be a reason for the lack of engagement of the independence forces. The text would have benefitted from more extensive use of anthropological sources.
Overall, however, the book proves to be a fundamental contribution to the debate on decolonization and anti-colonialism in the Pacific, in potentially strong dialogue with the historical, anthropological, and educational sciences.
Marta Gentilucci
Centre Universitaire de Formation et de Recherche, Mayotte