School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemImperial legacy: the politics of display in Australia( 2004)Somewhere among the countless rows of objects currently on display in the British Museum’s Enlightenment exhibition there rests a flaking bark shield. This battered, utilitarian object stands somewhat apart from the splendidly exotic artefacts that surround it. Yet beneath its unprepossessing appearance there lies an extraordinary provenance. It was taken in 1770 from the Eastern Australian seaboard by Captain Cook’s landing party during its initial encounter with the first inhabitants of the land incorporating what is now known as Sydney. The shield has been placed in a display of non-Western artefacts acquired during the period of Enlightenment discovery “through gift, trade or purchase”. In truth, however, none of these words could be used to describe its acquisition. It was hardly given, since it came into the party’s possession as a result of their shooting at a group of Eora people who left the cover of trees, apparently shouting at them to leave. Neither was it traded, unless one views a bullet fired in anger as a fair offer of exchange. Nor could it be called a purchase, unless one counts as a purchase price the blood shed by its original owner as he was hit trying to flee the invaders.
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ItemWhite-out: theatre as an agent of border patrol( 2003)In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman’s 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.
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ItemComing home to the land( 2006)A version of this essay appeared as Leslie, D. (2006). Coming home to the land. Eureka Street, March-April, 30-31.This essay is a tribute to artist Lin Onus. It explores and assesses his artistic legacy as a journey into a healing land; a place of refuge and Aboriginal tradition which encourages empathy. Onus’s painting is contemplated for the inspiration it presents, not only in regard to increased understanding of Aboriginal and cross-cultural Australian histories, but to the medium of painting as a way of bridging the cultural gap and transcending the limitations of history.
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ItemKilling competition: restricting access to political communication in Australia( 2003)Access to communication channels is a key factor influencing election outcomes. Policy changes and other factors have contributed toward the increasing use of expensive forms of mass-communication. What are the implications for the competitive landscape of Australian politics?
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ItemCultural studies and the neoliberal imagination( 1999)What remains of the liberal vision of a common public culture in a world of asserted differences? What mechanisms of consenting or dissenting identification sustain a democratic public sphere when politics becomes spectacular? And isn’t the representation of publicness always the performance of a division, an exclusion, a minoritization? In order to put the issues that I think are at stake in these questions as pointedly as I can, let me take as a brief example the rhetoric deployed in Australia at the moment by a politician called Pauline Hanson. Hanson is a right-wing populist in the mould of Le Pen, appealing to a broad working-class and rural constituency who have been damaged, and feel damaged, by the downsizing effects of globalization, by the decline of the rural sector, and by what they perceive to be favorable treatment given to indigenous and immigrant Australians. Her politics of grievance is expressed most economically in two statements: “All Australians should be equal,” and “All Australians should speak English.” The first of these statements means: “Indigenous people should not claim a separate cultural identity, nor the separate forms of political and economic recognition that might flow from it.” The second (which has its American counterparts in, for example, the Californian legislation deeming English to be the sole language of official business) means: “Asian migrants are not welcome in this country because they steal jobs from white people.” These are demands for cultural commonality and for shared civic values; they are at once perfectly reasonable and deeply racist. Note, however, that their illiberal force is expressed in the language of Enlightenment civility: the principles of the equality of citizens, of resistance to privilege, of the rule of law, of civic responsibility. To make this point is not to condemn that language but to say that its uses are always strategic, positional, overdetermined by the secondary codes that translate it for particular knowing audiences.
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ItemBeauty contest for the British bulldogs? Negotiating (trans)national identities in suburban Melbourne(Melbourne University Press, 2003-11)‘Britfest’ is a local festival held in the Melbourne suburb of Frankston. Like the numerous festivals of ethnicity in Australia that simultaneously celebrate cultural distinction and national incorporation, Britfest offers a historically specific reaction to the re-imagining of the nation. This article examines this new expressive tendency within the context of recent debates about Britishness in Australia, and explores the ramifications for identity formation and cultural affiliation among British migrants. By locating this analysis in Frankston, we aim to provide a situated example of the ways in which British ethnic identities are being negotiated. Such localised and specific responses, however, are operating within and are influenced by the broader context of shifting representations of a diverse British diaspora. Like British-Australians, members of this diaspora also inhabit nations shaped by the legacies of British imperialism, colonisation and migration. Shifting meanings of Britishness also represent and inform a more general ‘crisis of whiteness’, indicating how culturally embedded the colonial equation of Britishness with whiteness has been for those who imagine themselves at the core of the contemporary Australian nation.