Arts Collected Works - Research Publications

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    Systemic Silencing Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia
    McGregor, KE (University of Wisconsin Pres, 2023-08-29)
    The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” for decades, with a major wave beginning in the 1990s. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system’s history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself. Here, Katharine E. McGregor not only untangles the history of the system during the war, but also unpacks the context surrounding the slow and faltering efforts to address it. With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, she uncovers a critical piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye. Critically, she establishes that the transnational part of activism surrounding victims of the system is both necessary and fraught, a complexity of geopolitics and international relationships on one hand and a question of personal networks, linguistic differences, and cultural challenges on the other.
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    Towards an interactional grammar of interjections: Expressing compassion in four Australian languages
    Mushin, I ; Blythe, J ; Dahmen, J ; de Dear, C ; Gardner, R ; Possemato, F ; Stirling, L (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-01-01)
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    The Failure of 'Recognition'
    Muldoon, P (Arena Printing and Publishing, 2016)
    A successful referendum on the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may once have looked like a fairly good prospect. The failure of the founders to make any mention of Aboriginal people in the Constitution seemed self-evidently in need of correction, the proposal enjoyed bipartisan support in a parliament that could agree on little else, and, in the person of Tony Abbott, it found a prime minister who said he was willing to ‘sweat blood’ for it. Such, it seems, was the confidence (or was it in fact the desperation?) of the political establishment that it blithely commenced its ‘yes’ campaign, ‘Recognise’, before the substance of the proposal had even been decided. And yet the chances that we will even have settled on a question before 27 May 2017 rolls around—this being the date originally favoured by Abbott—now seem increasingly slim. For all the goodwill built up (and all the public-relations exercises undertaken) during the six years since Prime Minister Julia Gillard first returned it to the political agenda, recognition would appear to be on the brink of failing. What happened?
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    Speaking with Two Voices: 'We, the People(s) of Australia'?
    Muldoon, P ; Bonotti, M ; MIragliotta, N (Routledge, 2024)
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    After Apology: The Remains of the Past
    Muldoon, P (Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2017-05)
    In an extraordinarily prescient lecture, addressed to the nation responsible for the first ‘crime against humanity’, Theodor Adorno attested to the paradox of a past that lives on, but cannot be lived with: ‘one wants to get free of the past, rightly so, since one cannot live in its shadow, and since there is no end to terror if guilt and violence are only repaid, again and again, with guilt and violence. But wrongly so, since the past one wishes to evade is still so intensely alive’ (Adorno 115). Although ‘the past’ to which Adorno refers remains the exceptional instance of state crime, his observations strike at the heart of a dilemma that many political communities continue to grapple with today: how does one get free of a past that refuses to pass? Though an increasingly popular theme of intellectual inquiry, a burgeoning topic within the ever expanding and ever more sophisticated field of ‘memory studies’, the question could scarcely be dismissed as being of merely academic interest. Assuming John Torpey is even half right in suggesting that concern for the future has now been eclipsed by a ‘preoccupation with past crimes and atrocities’, the ‘righting old wrongs’ project is of more than marginal concern for states right around the world (Torpey 1). Indeed, if the problem of ‘coming to terms with the past’ was ever exclusively German, it is now a truly universal political concern.
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    Past Injustices and Future Protections: On the Politics of Promising
    Muldoon, P (Indigenous Law Centre University of New South Wales, 2009)
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    Between Speech and Silence: The Postcolonial Critic and the Idea of Emancipation
    Muldoon, P (Taylor and Francis Group, 2001-02-17)
    The concept of emancipation has an increasingly ambivalent status in postcolonial criticism. Under the influence of poststructuralism, the idea that the subaltern subject might overcome colonial relations of cultural domination through acts of self-representation has been thrown into disrepute. If there is to be emancipation, according to this view, it will not come through the recovery of an authentic speaking subject, but through strategies of ‘strategic essentialism’. Here it is argued that this postructuralist approach leaves the subaltern in a politically pre carious position and should be exchanged for the kind of hermeneutic approach that makes possible a genuine politics of recognition.