School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemDaryl Lindsay : vision for Australian art(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemThe characterisation of oil paintings in tropical southeast Asia(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemCosmopolitanism and fictionality in eighteenth-century literature : Montesquieu, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Oliver Goldsmith(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemDivide and embody : the moment of putting pen to paper in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello novels(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemA fragile thing : marketing remote area Aboriginal art(University of Melbourne, 2005)This dissertation examines the marketing of Australian Aboriginal art from remote area communities with a particular focus on the new marketing practices that have evolved in response to government policies. I will argue that the pressures to achieve economic sustainability are leading art centres to put greater emphasis on business rather than artistic development. Indigenous communities do not view art centres solely as businesses, but as mechanisms for cross-generational and cross-cultural communication. I will argue that the marketing of their art is a means of communicating their culture to a broader audience as well as creating employment opportunities within their communities. Chapter 1 defines the role of art centres, examines the contribution of art centres and arts advisors in the marketing of Indigenous art, and explains the role of different tiers of government in creating the infrastructure for the Indigenous art market. Chapter 2 argues that the economic rationalist perspective disregards the cultural, social and environmental issues facing Indigenous communities. It traces the shaping of the Indigenous tine art market through government policy and funding programs, Then it examines the impact of government funding arrangements in skewing community priorities through three funding scenarios: the development of a culture centre, withdrawal of government subsidy from an art centre and the exhibition Balgo 4-04. Chapter 3 surveys approaches to the marketing of art that achieve cultural outcomes rather than business results recounting examples of innovative marketing from Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation (WAAC), which were initiated with both business and cultural objectives. Chapter 4 explores the motivations of Indigenous communities in establishing art centres. It traces the history of Turkey Creek and the formation of the Warmun Art Centre and its marketing strategies. Chapter 5 addresses the economic issues faced by art centres in competing with private dealers in the marketplace. This study reveals the uniqueness and fragility of art centres operating in remote areas. I argue that the art centres' existence, and the fundamental role they play in maintaining the integrity of the market place through their marketing strategies, is threatened by the business model. In so doing, I question the current direction of government policy.
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Item“Revolting Developments”: productive shame in the graphic narratives of Phoebe Gloeckner and Aline Kominsky-Crumb( 2019)“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.
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ItemClosing the distance. Identity and self-representation in the Japanese literature of three Korean writers in Japan: Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong.( 2008)The theme of cultural identity is topical in the academy and society at large but it is especially significant for the Korean diaspora in Japan. This thesis investigates the means by which Japan-based second-generation Korean novelists Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong characterize 'zainichi Korean identity' in six semi-autobiographical novels written in Japanese between 1957 and 1972. I argue that a close reading of The Death of the Crow (1957) and The Extraordinary Ghost Story of Mandogi (1971) by Kim Sok Pom, The Cloth Fuller (1971) and For Kayako (1970) by Lee Hoe Sung1, and Frozen Mouth (1966) and Delusions (1971) by Kim Ha Gyong allows for an in-depth understanding of the experiences of Koreans born in Japan before 1945 and the effects of racial oppression on minority identity formation. Specifically, I evaluate and compare the methods by which ethnicity and images of the self are articulated by these three writers in their creative fiction. The thesis argues that, despite the diversity of the views the three writers off er on ethnicity and cultural identity, a theme which they all share is how to overcome the problem of identity fragmentation - the problem of negotiating incongruous hybrid Japanese/Korean identities. Ambivalent experiences of belonging or dislocation, vis-a-vis both Japan and Korea proper, surface as a continual source of concern for second-generation zainichi Korean writers and their protagonists. How hybridity and difference are articulated as a lived experience by Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong is at the heart of this thesis. Their protagonists are Japanese-appearing Korean men, who move between the two worlds of Japanese and (zainichi) Korean culture, and search for a unified identity, or at least contemplate what such an identity might be. In effect, they attempt to 'close the distance' between competing and conflicting images of the self while at the same time pointing to a new politics of identity and sense of belonging, where diversity no longer suggests distance but the possibilities inherent in a truly inclusive society.
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ItemThe challenges of valuing culture in Australia, and the role of symbiosis in understanding cultural interactions( 2019)This research examines the conditions and narratives that surround cultural value, particularly within the fields of cultural diplomacy, cultural policy and the arts. These conditions and narratives are situated within the context of knowledge or innovation-based societies where, over the past two decades, a rise in cultural value discourse has occurred. Knowledge-based societies also feature post-industrial economies and, therefore, in this thesis, the tendency to value culture in terms of economics is of particular significance. In Australia, this is evident across various municipal levels, from local councils to the federal government. Through a series of case studies encompassing the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the City of Melbourne and a federal policy proposal for a National Programme for Excellence in the Arts, I argue a common approach to the valuation of culture is evident, and is one that is rooted in instrumentalisation—or what Yudice characterises as expediency, where ‘culture-as-resource’ is a means to an end. However, this narrow scope limits the possibility to understand more about the different types of value that culture (such as the arts) can have, particularly when it comes to aesthetic exploration of new knowledges, global networks and relationships. To explore alternative considerations of what value culture can offer to both societies and people alike, I consider European theatre collective Rimini Protokoll’s ability to display the culture of nations in their touring performance of 100% City. Here, another realisation of the value of culture is discernible. In political terms, this is cultural value that resides outside the typical state-to-public facilitation of public diplomacy and rests on a people-to-people mode of communication. As a result, I argue that the current, utilitarian vocabulary surrounding the value of culture should be expanded and developed further to reflect its operation today in the age of global networks and relationships. Such an expansion incorporates a symbiotic consideration of the interactions that occur over the course of cultural relationships and counterbalances the over-reliance on economic and political factors and evaluations. My proposal serves to further refine understandings of ‘the cultural’ within the discourse of cultural value. To do so, I draw upon the biological understanding of relationships, referred to as symbiosis, to study how cultural value is understood amongst the private and public sector actors across three key dimensions: the economic, the political and the social. As a result, I propose cultural symbiosis as a conceptual metaphor that assists in the articulation of the more complex and multifaceted relations that cultural activity can generate. This conceptualisation provides the basis for an approach that better articulates the relations of cultural activity and one that extends the neoliberal vocabulary currently used to describe culture and the discourse of cultural value.