Possibilities Through ‘Strategic Essentialism’: Adani TNC and Protest and Negotiation Discourses in Australia

Abstract

A common space of transnational studies is the multinational corporation. This chapter looks at how an Indian mining company seeks to extend its operations into Australia, disturbing both state and federal political spaces, but also crossing into contested spaces of economy, Indigenous identity and environmental activism. It shows how the seemingly fundamental location of Indigeneity can fracture into competing interests and how protecting an essential local Indigenous identity can involve strategic movements into pan-national and transnational spaces.

What I mean by ethical belonging partially entails a reclaiming and rearticulation of subordinate and subaltern humanity as a site of strategic universalism. … Such strategic universalism as espoused by subaltern artists must in fact be read as a form of resistance, which is a refusal to see the world only from the place of subordination or victimhood.

—Rinaldo Walcott (2007, 22)

For too long, oppressed groups have been forced to constantly militarize their sense of identity, (1) as though their identities had no truth or significance beyond the expediency of polemics and strategy (when did we last hear of the practice of “strategic essentialism” by Western white Europeans?), and (2) as though the meaning of their lives has to be perennially played out in the context of dominant identities who supposedly have transacted the strategic and the political in the name of their successful and ‘natural’ history.

—R. Radhakrishnan (1996, xxvi)