Philosophy Progress Review Seminar

This thesis seeks to understand a philosophy of force, violence and resistance by exploring the contexts of caste and racial discrimination in India and Australia, as represented through literature. By examining these distinct socio-political contexts, this project will seek to understand violence in relation to a juridical notion of power and force. It will also look at the normative claims of violence and the possibility of seeing whether nonviolent forms of action can be categorised as truly non-violent. For this seminar, I present a part of my chapter on Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book, a novel that discusses indigenous rights in Australia in a futuristic time where the world has become irrevocably altered by climate change. Through this work, I study the operative mechanisms that underlie colonial violence and the narrative strategies that help resist such violence.