School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
ItemIntroduction(Cambridge University Press, 1997)As a collection of British colonies and then a nation, Australia came into existence as a product of both colonialism and modernity; proud of its fancied youth and eager for the fruits of civilisation, enamoured with progress yet yearning for tradition. Historical accounts of Australia have equally been products of colonialism and modernity. More often than not, the mission of history has been to remember the triumph of colonising a continent and forming a modern nation state with destiny on its side. While the historical legacies of colonialism and modernity remain palpable, many of the dreams of colonialism and modernity lie in ruins. This is a book from these 'ruins' in the sense that it discusses both the colonial past of former colonies and the colonising of indigenous people in Australia. But ruins are never simply gone or in the past; ruins are enduring traces; spaces of romantic fancies and forgetfulness where social memories imagine the persistence of time in records of destruction. Thus this book is about the past in the present, it is written from within contemporary cultures of history. It moves from Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook, jumps to the installation of history in museums and school curricula, glides through the historiography of archetypal historical events. This is a book with strong hopes for history and social memory. My interest is not in hammering home the constructedness of history, nor in the important task of diversifying and proliferating accounts of neglected historical actors but in thinking historically about existing social memory. It is a gesture towards learning to inhabit landscapes of memory which are, in part, landscapes littered with ruins; some archaic and others nightmarish, some quaint simulations and others desperate echoes. I imagine such a landscape of memories not as homeless place for lost souls but a ground from which new flights of historical imagination might depart and to which they might return, differently.
-
ItemExperiments in culture: an introduction(Monash University ePress, 2006)The last two decades have witnessed an explosion in the development of new public and private museums throughout the world. If this is surprising it is only because, for much of the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as, if not extinct, then certainly archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgment is being proved wrong across the globe as innovative and distinctive museums are staking out new territory for themselves as vital, dynamic, public and civic cultural institutions. Nowhere is this most striking than in the South Pacific where large, new or significantly expanded public museums and cultural centres have opened since the 1990s, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Many more museums in that region have undertaken major renovations. South Pacific museums: Experiments in culture brings together a collection of outstanding analysis of these museums by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduces the reader to key museums in the region while the essays explore these museum developments in the broadest possible terms. The museums under analysis are part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, where cities brand themselves, where indigeneity articulates with colonialism, where exhibitionary technologies and pedagogies meet entertainment, where histories are fought over, where local identities intersect with academic and popular knowledge, where objects and provenance are displayed and contested, where remembering and forgetting dance their endless dance.
-
ItemVive L’Amour: eloquent emptiness(British Film Institute, 2003)Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-liang, 1994), winner of the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice International Film Festival, is the second part in a three-part film-cycle by Tsai Ming-liang, the Malaysian-born art-house director working from Taiwan. Following Rebels of the Neon God (Tsai Ming-liang, 1992) and preceding The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1996), Amour contributes to Tsai’s ongoing filmic exploration of the conditions of human subsistence in millennial Taipei. His films’ settings amid the city’s dismal concrete and neon streetscapes, their minimalist stories of the aimless days and nights of drifting, marginal characters and their austere cinematic style have earned Tsai his name as filmic philosopher of existential anxiety in post-‘economic miracle’ Taiwan.
-
ItemIntroduction(Hodder Arnold, 2003)Before you begin reading this book, take a moment to think about its title: Interpreting Everyday Culture. What kind of project does this title suggest? What’s the definition of ‘everyday’, and what sort of ‘culture’ might characterize it? And, whatever definition we agree on, is ‘everyday culture’, in any case, amenable to interpretation? Or does the very ordinariness and taken-for-grantedness of the culture of our day-to-day lives make it inherently resistant to academic elucidation? Evidently, since you hold in your hands an entire book written by us on this subject, we’re going to try to convince you that there is indeed much to be gained from subjecting everyday culture to intellectual scrutiny. But we want to start out by drawing your attention to what a strange, slippery, and paradoxical concept ‘everyday culture’ is, despite its deceptive obviousness. Consequently, the interpretation of everyday culture is often a counterintuitive -even unsettling- endeavour. But in the pages that follow, we hope to show you how it’s also a very rewarding project, one that can lead to unexpected and illuminating insight into the surprisingly complex significance of all the things we do, day after day, while barely noticing that we’re doing them.