School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemMultilingual negotiations: the place and significance of translation in multilingual poetry(The Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona, 2021)Multilingual poetry, which weaves together multiple languages, necessarily straddles multiple cultural contexts. This raises the question of how poets who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges, who they write for, and how their audiences receive them. Using Suresh Canagarajah’s Negotiation Model to examine poets’ linguistic choices, including whether and when to provide translations, and Mendieta-Lombardo and Cintron’s adaptation of the Myers-Scotton Markedness Model to consider audience and context, this paper will examine examples of contemporary bilingual and multilingual poetry published in Australia and Canada to identify the many conversations and negotiations that must take place between language-cultures as well as between multilingual poets and audiences for these poems to ‘work’.
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ItemGoverning creative industries in the post-normative cultural condition(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-09-19)Contemporary cultural policy seeks to govern an increasingly complex terrain, one marked by rapid technological change, expanded channels for creative production and participation, global interconnectedness and social diversity, and a fluidity of cultural form. Through an analysis of Creative State, the first creative industries strategy in the state of Victoria, Australia, this article argues that the creative industries are, in part, a governmental response to the complexity of the cultural landscape. As critics have identified, these are ideological documents, often prioritising the economic benefits of culture over other forms of value. But they also reflect broader efforts to reconfigure government’s relationship to the cultural field, and to expand the set of actors involved in making culture. In this article we trace out these new relationships through the policy-making process, identifying its tensions and contradictions. Understanding the multi-sited, non-linear nature of policy forms the basis, we argue, for cultivating a generative cultural critique that might engage more productively with cultural policy, taking account of the plural and competing perspectives it must manage.
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ItemThilly Weissenborn: Photographer of the Netherlands East Indies(Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2021-04-30)Thilly Weissenborn (1883–1964) was one of Indonesia’s first woman photogra- phers of significance. She was born in Java but schooled, like most Netherlands colonials, in The Hague. At the age of eighteen, Thilly returned to Java where she trained in the famous Atelier Kurkdjian before opening her own studio in the province of Preanger. For more than two decades, she supplied the colonial government’s tourist bureau with photographs featuring Java’s exotic-looking scenery and Balinese temples and dancers. She also supplied Dutch dignitaries, colonial officials and wealthy Dutch families with souvenir albums featuring scenic photographs and Bali’s governors and royalty. I argue that although her growing obsession with light was a feature shared by many contemporary American photographers, her photographs differed from theirs by dint of their connection to Netherlands colonialism. I further argue that this is most evident in their focus on the beauty of the landscape and the seeming tranquillity of life under colonial rule, but also their strong allusions to the Mooi Indië style of paintings popular among Dutch settlers. In the twenty-year period leading up to Japan’s invasion of Indonesia, Weissenborn’s images were widely sought after and reproduced by the Dutch East Indies Tourist Bureau; however, their strong connection to Netherlands colonialism means that they are today not just regarded ambivalently by photographic historians, but are frequently overlooked.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Politics of Disgust: Form and Feeling in Christos Tsiolkas's Merciless Gods(Project MUSE, 2021)Merciless Gods (2014) is Christos Tsiolkas's only collection of short stories and arguably his least discussed work to date. Comprising stories that Tsiolkas published in various literary magazines and anthologies as early as 1995, Merciless Gods is persistent in its fixation on the relationship between queer desire, identity, and disgust. Throughout the collection, characters are frequently exposed to the bodily discharges that most of us tend to dissociate from, cringe at, and conceal from one another: sweat, semen, odor, and excrement. Characters also blurt out vile homophobic and racist bigotry in impulsive overflows of speech that bring about release and disgust at the same time. In this article, we read the spasmic (in all its forms) as a liminal space of joy and repulsion that constitutes what we call Tsiolkas's politics of disgust. We argue that disgust is crucial to Tsiolkas's deeply humanist and densely historical project, best exemplified in Merciless Gods in the ways that form—short fiction and the collection—arouses distinct feelings in readers that they cannot escape and that Tsiolkas's work refuses to gloss over. In this way, Merciless Gods testifies to Tsiolkas's compulsive return to fundamental questions of justice and distribution of misery and well-being.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) young people leaving out-of-home care in Australia: A national scoping study(Elsevier, 2021-02-01)Indigenous children (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia) are known to be over-represented in many out-of-home care systems, particularly within the English-speaking world. But, to date, there has been little analysis of their specific experiences and pathways as they transition from care at 18 years of age and younger. This study, based on focus groups and interviews with 53 representatives of government departments, non-government organisations and Aboriginal community-controlled organisations across Australia, examined the numbers of Indigenous care leavers, their needs and outcomes, and associated policy and programs. Our project recommended a number of key policy and practice reforms pertaining to data collection, funding, and the provision of culturally appropriate services.
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ItemRobot death care: A study of funerary practice(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021-07)Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.
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ItemShifting the Ground: Rethinking Chinese Art(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021)This special open-call issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (ANZJA) presents papers that examine issues relating to art of the Greater China region encompassing mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Chinese diasporas. Here, Greater China is understood as an active cultural space defined by historical, multi-directional flows of people and ideas rather than territorial boundaries, with Chinese diaspora connecting China to all parts of the world. The aim in encouraging writers to think about the Greater China cultural space is to recover forgotten or marginalised histories and suggest alternatives to monolithic national narratives in order to reconfigure the field of Chinese art history in more complex and connected ways.
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ItemApichatpong Weerasethakul’s Sleep Cinema: Intimacy, Inattention, Surrealism(University of Melbourne, 2021)This article investigates the role of sleep in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s filmmaking. Throughout his career, Apichatpong has exhibited an idiosyncratic interest in sleep. In contrast to conventional narrative cinema, his narrative features typically follow associational dream logics, his characters are often shown sleeping or in states of partial consciousness, while the slow, purposeful rhythms of his film style often lull spectators to sleep. Yet beyond sleeps diegetic appearance in his films, it also informs Apichatpong’s unusual understanding of the architecture of cinematic spectatorship, guiding his belief that sleep and cinema are inextricably entwined. Within this article, I analyse Apichatpong’s installation SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, a fusion of video installation with functioning hotel first staged at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018, which I situate within the broader aesthetic traditions of surrealism, durational performance and contemporary Thai cinema, concentrating on the work of André Breton, Andy Warhol, Max Richter and Thai animistic cinema. Through this analysis, I argue that Apichatpong’s cinematic mediation of sleep marks a significant departure from conventional organisations of cinema, and creates space for inattentiveness, intimacy and political action among spectators.
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ItemThe emergence of Japanese film festivals in the Asia-Pacific 1990-2018(Informa UK Limited, 2021-05-04)This article traces the historical transformations of the Japanese film festivals (JFFs) in the Asia-Pacific, reflecting on the reasons behind their emergence and subsequent expansion. It identifies JFFs as cultural diplomacy film festivals due to the participation of the Japanese government in facilitating the events. By situating the analysis within the global, regional, national and local trends that gave rise to the JFF model, we can better understand the roles these festivals have played in the promotion of national cultures abroad since their inception. Drawing on archival materials, personal interviews with the festival organizers, and institutional documents, this essay will show that the developments of JFFs are influenced by several interconnected discourses including the proliferation of the film festival format globally, changes in Japanese cultural diplomacy, the globalization of Japanese popular culture, and soft power discourse in the region. In engaging with these forces, JFFs evolved from sporadic small-scale film screening events with limited international reach to institutionalized festivals characterized by their growing commercial approach and broader programs.
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ItemToshiki Okada's Ecological Theatre(MIT Press - Journals, 2021-01)