School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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Item'Race portraits' and vernacular possibilities: heritage and culture(Cambridge University Press, 2001)'Heritage' is a term both broad and slippery. Beyond the literal meaning of property passed between generations, its contemporary evocations include 'inherited customs, beliefs and institutions held in common by a nation or community . . . [and] natural and "built" landscapes, buildings and environments held in trust for future generations' (Davison et. al. 1998, p. 308). Even this elemental definition strongly associates cultural institutions and heritage. Most cultural institutions articulate inherited customs and beliefs through a sense of heritage which, in turn, certifies their authenticity and legitimacy. Parliamentary conventions, halls of fame and honour boards, much judicial ritual, the use of uniforms, anniversary commemorations of all sorts and university degree conferring ceremonies are strong examples of such practices. At the same time the more material and codified notion of heritage as things held in trust explicitly organises the work of many cultural institutions.
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ItemChained to their signs: remembering breastplates(Pluto Press, 2001)At first glance, breastplates might seem to be just another device in the technology of colonial capture in Australia. Take the photograph of Bilin Bilin wearing a plate inscribed 'Jackey Jackey - King of the Logan and Pimpama'. The plate, the chain and the conventions of photography produce a Yugambeh elder as a shackled criminal on display - he is both a primitive in tableau and one of 'the usual suspects'. The image seems to both document captivity and evoke those 'frontier photographs' of Aboriginal prisoners in the desert bound together with heavy chains attached to manacles around their necks. This initial impression is right in that it recognizes some of the ways in which colonial captivity is not only about actual imprisonment but equally about how captivity is understood, represented, interpreted and made historical. Still, in this chapter I want to persuade you that breastplates and photographs of breastplates performed other roles: as cross-cultural objects and signs.
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ItemIntercultural performance in the context of cultural pluralism(Circus Oz and Monash University, Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, 2001)In this paper I will provisionally argue for the possibility of localised intercultural relationships in the live performing arts as an effective and pluralist site of resistance to totalising forces associated with globalisation. There will be four themes to my argument and I apologise in advance that I will only briefly touch on each of them. They are: i.Defining globalisation ii.Cultural pluralism iii.Australia and Japan (the two sites of performance culture that I have expertise in and have been asked to address) iv.Live performing arts: the Gekidan Kaitaisha-NYID project.
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ItemThe Irish conceit: Ireland and the new Australian nationalism(Crossing Press, 2000)Michael’s narrative provides an example of the deployment of Ireland in the new narratives of nation generated by Australia’s new nationalist movements, especially as characterised in the One Nation Party of Pauline Hanson. In the various versions of this narrative I have recorded, we find similar structural elements. Firstly, a claim is made on Irish ancestry. Secondly, a story is told of a lost farm and the attempt to retrieve this farm through a land claim made on the Irish government. Thirdly, the narrative arrives at its denouement by condensing the Aboriginal history of dispossession and subsequent attempts to reclaim land within the greater history of Irish suffering, dispossession and the tragic impossibility of any form of redress for the Australian victims of the Irish diaspora. The mythologised history of Ireland, heavy with emotive and dramatic character, but deprived of any real historical actuality, is drawn into analogy with a compressed narrative of Aboriginal dispossession, colonisation and genocide drained of both historical and emotional content and registering only as a sub-plot, an ancillary tale of lesser suffering. The Irish narrative subsumes that of the ‘lesser’ story of Aboriginal dispossession, reforging a new narrative in which Irish dispossession assumes many of the features of Aboriginal dispossession. The Irish subjects of this narrative suffer the aggression of a British colonisation coloured by landmark features of Aboriginal dispossession. Real historical elements such as the taking of Aboriginal children from their families by the white Australian state, for example, enter the story as the experience of Irish Australians. Irish children, not Aboriginal children, are stolen and institutionalised by the British ‘so that they can lose their Irish accent’. The two narratives are condensed and reframed in order to resituate the Irish Australian as the victim of colonisation. In this process, a series of inversions occur. In the Irish-Australian narrative suffering is brought into the present. Massacres happen in living memory, and are witnessed by and perpetrated on the narrator’s immediate family. In the Aboriginal narrative a disembodied suffering occurs at the limit of Australian history, outside human memory and human experience. In the Irish-Australian narrative suffering is perpetrated on the innocent victims of British aggression; in the Aboriginal narrative such acts are the result of the indigence, violence and barbarity of the Aborigines. Michael’s narrative is actually very unusual in that he names both his father and his father’s mates as responsible for the taking of children, but this act floats out of real time in its ‘all the time’ location.
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ItemWhat can’t be seen can be seen: Butoh politics and (body) play(Rodopi, 2000)Asobi, a Japanese term that connotes play and amusement is rarely associated with the physical or cultural dynamics of butoh. Yet as performer Yumi Umiumare who danced with Maro Akaji’s dark-soul (ankoku) butoh group Dairakudakan for ten years argues: “these days their work seems more like pop” (Umiumare 1999). Bodies in performance are subject to the interplay of context and culture and for this reason what was once rare in art and distasteful to society can become commonplace and fashionable; To cite Jameson, a cultural turn of “postmodern mutations where the apocalyptic suddenly turns into the decorative (or at least diminishes abruptly into ‘something you have around the home’)” (1991: xvii). If attempts to signify butoh have become playful (for example, a trend seen in the increasing emphasis on performing the sensibilities of cuteness [kawaii] in Japanese post-butoh dance) and bodies are the decorative agents of the ludic condition, have we in fact reached an endgame for butoh? Alternatively, might artists not intensify the qualities of play in performance, escalate and increase their velocity to reach a point at which they explode and divulge an anti-playful opposite? This is to engage in what Auslander observes as a “transition from transgressive to resistant political art” in the postmodern era (1997: 58), resistance that might be found in this instance in an intense accumulation of signs on and through the body and their reproduction ad infinitum to the point of absurdity. Except that there are apparent resistances to some bodies; resistance also in Asian bodies opening-up new spaces in contemporary Australia. Umiumare and her collaborations with Malay-Australian performer Tony Yap might be productively read in this way.
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ItemGreat white noise(Melbourne University Publishing, 2004)The yawning gulf that everyone talks about isn’t between so-called elites and the mainstream, or even between the city and the bush. The big gap in Australian politics is between cleverly deployed political stereotypes and the realities of growing inequality and widespread dissatisfaction with economic ‘reform’. Elites, in other words, have been made targets of the same strategy of demonising the ‘other’ that has been used on asylum-seekers, Aboriginal land rights campaigners, ethnic youth gangs, ‘welfare mothers’, and so on. On the face of it, the current demonisation of elites is as irrational as it is clever. It is irrational because it shows contempt for the views of the thousands of Australians who wrote letters to newspapers, signed petitions and started community groups to show their outrage at the Howard government’s policies on reconciliation, on the Wik 10-point plan, on saying sorry to the stolen generations, on the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers, and so on. Were all those who came from far and wide to march for reconciliation and plant seas of hands in capital cities, or who protested against the war in Iraq, really just part of an ‘elite’? The attack is clever because it helps to mask the fact that those who attack elites are themselves part of an elite. How many ‘ordinary people’ have a radio show or a newspaper column? How many ‘ordinary people’ have the opportunity to vet the appointment of a government minister, as radio talkback host Alan Jones did in late 2001 before the instalment of a new police minister in New South Wales?