Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, eds. (2022). Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence. Routledge

Reviewed by Monique Hurley, Managing Lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, Australia

One of the first visuals that crosses your computer screen when you enter the Deathscapes online portal is a photo of black, red and yellow passports branded with Aboriginal flags. Like the website, Mapping Deathscapes is grounded in the work of the late Wiradjuri man Uncle Ray Jackson (Pugliese, 2015) who, as part of his activism, initiated and staged a number of Aboriginal passport ceremonies. In these ceremonies, Aboriginal passports were issued to non-Indigenous people as an act of reclaiming sovereignty over unceded land. In some, passports were issued in absentia to people seeking refuge in so-called Australia as a form of “counter-technology through which the state’s sovereign claims may begin to be undone” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 1).

Exposing the drivers and enablers of state violence against racialised groups through some more traditional, and other more creative, means is the central goal of the Deathscapes research project. Edited by the chief investigators of the project itself – Professors Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese – Mapping Deathscapes offers an analysis of, and is a companion piece to, the Deathscapes online portal that describes itself as seeking “new ways to document, understand, and respond to contemporary racialised violence in settler states. The volume also includes chapters, artwork and poetry by the international team of contributors to the site.

To fully appreciate Mapping Deathscapes, the reader must consider the project in its entirety by exploring the online portal. Described as a “counter-archive”, the portal is constructed “‘rooms’ or pavilions, the largest of which showcases individual case studies; nested within it are the lived histories, testimonials and analytical accounts of deaths in custody” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 7), and the case studies are connected by hyperlinked ‘passages’ or key terms. While the case studies represent the project’s primary form of analysis, other sections of the site (like the Inspirations, Engagement and Galleries sections) present glimpses into the more creative aspects of the project. Mapping Deathscapes is a particularly pertinent project at a time when the coronial inquest into the death Warlpiri teenager Kumanjayi Walker after a police shooting attracted significant attention in the Northern Territory, in Australia (Department of the Attorney General and Justice, 2022 – 2024). Kumanjayi Walker is one of over 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people killed in custody since

Australia’s Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) handed down its final report in 1991, and his case is referenced throughout the volume as evidence of the Deathscapes contention “that Indigenous peoples continue to die at the hands of the colonial state machinery” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 50).

The volume is divided into five parts that examine the different and distinctive ways in which the Deathscapes site explores racial violence, with a focus on deaths in custody in police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres in settler states. Together, the volume confirms that deaths in custody are not an accident, but a tool deployed by governments to continue the oppression of racialised groups of people.

Part I explores key concepts, starting with Patricia Hill Collins articulating the “relationship between intersectional analyses of violence and the organisation of intersecting power relations” by “focusing on patterned connections among specific cases of violence” – “lethal intersections” – where death is prominent (p 27). By assembling case studies like that of Yamatji woman Ms Dhu, the Deathscapes project links individual cases to one another “as well as processes of state-sanctioned violence” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 34) in a way that helps the reader analyse “power itself” while at the same time emphasising the importance of centring the voices of those who have “experienced violence as risk to themselves and loved ones” and following their lead in driving change (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 43-44). Maria Giannacopoulos goes on to chart the ways in which “the imposition of law is a form of violence” and credits the Deathscapes project with helping her articulate the “colonial debtscape” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022:59) – the “concealment of Australia’s unpaid sovereign debt to Aboriginal peoples” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 57) – and encourages a rethinking of much celebrated cases like Mabo that “further bur[y] the sovereign debt owed” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 57).

Part II focuses on the violence experienced by Aboriginal women at the hands of the ‘justice’ system, with readers forced to confront the harrowing experiences of Jody Gore, Tamica Mullaley and baby Charlie and Ms Dhu, whose cases together demonstrate how they were “treated as angry Black women whose incarceration… [was] more important than their lives” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 121). Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker’s Close the Inquest hauntingly ends Part II, reminding us of the failure of current systems to recognise racism and that Aboriginal people continue to be killed because of it (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 127).

Part III examines the experiences of people seeking refuge being subjected to violence that “is both produced and normalised by states through their regimes of border governance” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 131). Starting with the unsettling visual of Marziya Mohammedali’s Call Them Home, that pays tribute to the unknown “mass casualties of Australia’s war on those who try to seek refuge by sea” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 130), chapters in this part explore “the forms of death visited on refugees both at the borders and metropolitan centres of Europe and the United States” (p. 131) and offer insight into how intentional, normalised and enmeshed in history racialised state violence is across the globe.

Part IV explores how artistic and other creative methods of expression can be mobilised as a form of witnessing and counter-testimony, focusing on the “buried histories of colonial massacre and how they may be uncovered and made visible anew in and for the present” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022:201). Thoughtful critique of the use of “colonial tools, such as maps and other observation devices” is offered by Antonio Traverso in relation to mapping the visualisation of racial violence in Australia (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 217-238).

Part V concludes the volume with Kyle Carrero Lopez’s poem After Abolition and an afterword on transformative justice that itself ends with an extract from the same poem. Kyle Carrero Lopez’s work imagines a future where “prisons and cops will become nightmare fables” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 263) and speaks to the ultimate aim of the Deathscapes project: “the abolition of the racial-prison-industrial-border complex as the governing lynchpin of the settler state” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 263). Formed with the aim of ending deaths in custody, the Deathscapes project serves as an important resource for anyone working towards this goal. It offers an understanding of deaths in custody not through the lens of the settler state, but through amplifying the experiences and perspectives of those who have been subjected to violence at their hands. In the face of what “appears to be an intractable reality of solidified violence” (Perera and Pugliese, 2022: 264), ending the volume with the brave vision of After Abolition helps the reader feel inspired that the seemingly “impossible” abolition of the carceral state might indeed be possible if we are prepared to think outside current structures and work in solidarity with people who have been impacted by those structures towards such a future.

For a practising human rights lawyer, the Deathscapes project is an invaluable resource. The volume Mapping Deathscapes draws critical connections across continents to expose deaths in custody for what they are – not tragic accidents or isolated incidents, but deaths permitted and perpetrated by racist state machinery. Academic in its analysis, the volume’s commentary of the portal helps crystallise key concepts and provides language that helps situate deaths in custody within broader systems of oppression. The project reminds us of the ongoing and interconnectedness of struggles endured by First Nations people and people seeking refuge, and reiterates the critical importance of ensuring that the work we do as lawyers does not just tinker at the edges to make harmful systems slightly less so, but supports tearing down the systems of oppression that permit deaths in custody to continue.


Click here to view more details on Deathscapes: Mapping Race And Violence In Settler Societies

References

Coroner’s Court of Western Australia, (2016) Inquest into the Death of Ms Dhu.

Department of the Attorney General and Justice. (2022 – 2024) ‘Kumanjayi Walker Coronial Inquest’. Northern Territory Government. https://justice.nt.gov.au/attorney-general-and-justice/courts/inquests-findings/kumanjayi-walker

Pugliese, J. (2015) ‘Geopolitics of aboriginal sovereignty: Colonial law as ‘a species of excess of its own authority’, aboriginal passport ceremonies and asylum seekers’. Law Text Culture, 19: 84 – 115.

Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. (1991) National Report. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service