School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
ItemFrom "Homelands" to "Wastelands": landscapes of memory in poetry, place and photography( 2012)This thesis explores the gaps within the familial narrative, including those found in the photographic archive. The ideological framework of the family, and the ways in which we create and imagine domestic landscapes, is examined through a “reading” of family photographs, a key feature of this thesis. Family photographs frame and trigger individual and familial memory and instigate forgetting. Additionally, landscapes of memory and identity are strongly linked to, and inform a dis/connection to place. Our “sense of place” is also informed by trajectories of migration both forced and desired. The meaning of “home” and the ways in which we imagine “home” is, in turn, informed by the construction of myths, shared through generations. Utilising notions of memory, place and landscape in my photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” as a point of departure, the thesis also examines how cultural memory is mediated through place and photography. The thesis traverses various terrains and cultural geographies, investigating how cultural identity is both informed and challenged by myths of the nation, “home” and “homelands”, childhood and the family. Within my own family, narratives of migration and settlement both anchor familial bonds while simultaneously disputing and supporting nationalist narratives. The confluence of migrations from Jamaica, Wales and England to Australia offers a new perspective on colonisation, nationalism, belonging, and “home” in an examination of myths of the family, place, and cultural identity in Australia and my family’s countries of “origin”. An analysis of both place and the photographic image, as repositories of memory, create what Michel Foucault terms counter-memories and reveal histories “hidden” or erased in visual and written discourses of the nation-state and the dominant narrative of the family, which is often patriarchal or monolithic. The thesis also adopts an interdisciplinary approach within visual and cultural studies with a strong emphasis on feminist theories and those located within the fields of memory studies and postcolonial and diaspora studies. The thesis is divided into two sections: the photo-poetic work “A Time in Place” and the critical component entitled “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. “A Time in Place” responds to places (both in the natural and built environment) of familial and personal significance in my family’s patterns of migrations. Three parts constitute the critical component of the thesis “From “Homelands” to “Wastelands””. The first of these explores place and memory (including forgetting) in family photographs taken in Jamaica, England and Wales. The second examines the work of three contemporary photographers: Ingrid Pollard, Simryn Gill, and Sandy Edwards, and the ways in which they negotiate identity, place, space, diaspora and the family. The third investigates “sense of place” and the notion of home through a psychogeographic exploration of my “hometown”, Newcastle, Australia.
-
ItemRelational 'glocalities': a study of 'cartographies' of media and migration through the approach of 'glocal' cosmopolitanism( 2012)In this thesis, I explore constructions of social spaces in experiences of media and migration. In particular, I focus on the interweaving of the ‘global’ and the 'local' in a distinctive, Singaporean context of contemporary globalised media and migration. This study involves a hermeneutical analysis of phenomenological interviews with twenty-one Singaporeans who are university students in Melbourne, Australia. While this thesis is primarily positioned in media and migration studies, I develop a conceptual framework that draws and builds on related discourses of mediated globalisation and cosmopolitanism, as well as mediated social spaces. In particular, I expand existing conceptions of 'relational space' to a tripartite conception. I conceptualise three dimensions of what I view as 'relational spaces': spaces as constructed through social relations (social spaces), relations between social spaces, and relations to social spaces. I argue that social spaces are constructed in experiences of media and migration as 'cartographies' (see Brah, 1996, p. 145) characterised by 'relational glocalities'. I define 'relational glocalities' as 'glocal' (R. Robertson, 1995) social spaces that are locally and unequally differentiated in relation to one another within 'global fields' (Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2009; R. Robertson, 1992). Drawing on Beck’s (2006) approach of 'methodological cosmopolitanism' and Robertson’s (1992, 1995) conception of 'glocality' as a 'universalism-particularism nexus', I introduce the concept of 'glocal cosmopolitanism' to examine the construction of 'relational glocalities' through dialectical negotiation between 'universalism' and 'particularism'. The notion of 'relational glocalities' challenges the established approach of 'methodological nationalism' (Beck, 2006; A. Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003) that informs existing research on media and migration. It contributes to the reconceptualisation of sociospatial experiences of media and migration through the approach of 'methodological cosmopolitanism' (Beck, 2006; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2009; Beck & Grande, 2010; Georgiou, 2007b; Jansson, 2009). This study finds that a multiplicity and diversity of countries and cities of migration are apparent in and across macrostructural constructions of what I describe as 'biographical geographies'. 'Biographical geographies' are differentiated by stages of migration, the relevance of close personal relations for experiences of migration, as well as first-hand and second-hand experiences of migration. Expanding the view of social spaces beyond (particular) countries and cities, this study finds that a much broader variety of 'relational spaces' are relevant in microstructural constructions of 'cartographies'. I identify distinct 'relational spaces' that emerge as configurations of media, social relations, place, and space. In the final chapter, I discuss the broader potential of 'glocal cosmopolitanism' as a framework to examine sociospatial experiences of media and migration in a global environment of networked communication (Castells, 2010).
-
ItemFrom Baudelaire to Sebald via the Australian diaspora: migrancy, exile and reflective literary memories( 2012)While many studies in memory scholarship engage with memory as a discrete entity, this thesis engages with the field of memory’s literary representation. The thesis highlights literature’s active reflection upon memory, as well as its echo of the concerns with memory experienced more broadly in the late-twentieth century. Positioning itself at the intersection of twentieth-century literature and memory studies, this thesis argues that literary texts have made nuanced contributions to understandings of memory’s myriad roles and recent rise, in ways that are commonly unrecognised in memory studies scholarship. Informed by theories of temporality and place as well as by those of memory, the thesis embarks on an engaged, associative reading of different texts from three contexts of twentieth-century experience — the post-Second World War, the post- colonial and the post-migration. This reading reveals literature’s engagement with memory’s presence as well as its absence and, crucially, literature’s conjoining and complication of these qualities of memory. Looking to philosophies of memory and temporality in my first chapter, I examine the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well as the work of Walter Benjamin, analysing how poetic form interrelates with representations of memory and time. This discussion provides a grounding and point of comparison for my second chapter, which engages with the work of Walter Benjamin from a somewhat different perspective, examining his semi-autobiographical prose on memory and modern place. By demonstrating the work of Benjamin’s writing in relocating the memory of place to a literary space, my discussion reveals memory’s interrelationship to prose as well as to poetry. These two chapters, entailing engagement with theories of temporality as well as with memory, reveal memory’s dynamic relationship with modern place and time, and with the temporal processes of writing itself—interrelations which bring to the fore memory’s complexities and absences. This discussion is the foundation for my study of memory in the late-twentieth century, where I engage with the presence as well as the promise of memory in writing, in the context of memory’s current fascination and recent rise. Moving to the work of W.G. Sebald, I argue that After Nature, his lesser-studied poem, realises the promise of memory in the post-war present, whilst also articulating the difficulties and losses of memory. This tension and duality, present to a lesser extent in Sebald’s prose, is productive of questioning insight into memory as well as writing. Moving to a further consideration of memory’s challenges and potentialities, I examine memory in the work of the post-colonial writer, J.M. Coetzee. Looking beyond the more thoroughly explored theme of history, this chapter examines memory in Coetzee’s memoirs and fiction, discussing the voice and presentation of childhood in Boyhood, and the fraught representation of the memories of others in the novel Foe. Examining memory in one further, literary context of the twentieth century, I explore the poetry and prose of the migrant Australian writer, Antigone Kefala, demonstrating how a reflective representation of post-migration memory entails a questioning of any one place as a point of home, and an ongoing experience of memory in the diaspora. In a final reflection on memory’s recent representations, I turn to a discussion of memory in contemporary art film. Noting the migration of memory themes and concerns across disciplines, I then consider how the structures of memory in film reorient and enrich approaches to memory in literature. Recent films, like recent writing, ask for a reflective engagement with memory that is conscious of representation as a means of record and of remembering, as well as a means of reorienting conceptions of memory, so that memory’s losses and absences as well as its presences are encountered.