bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Exiled by Definition:The Salar of Northwest China
Authors: Goodman David SG
Published: September 2014

The reform of state socialism came relatively late to Qinghai Province in the Northwest of the People’s Republic of China. One of Qinghai’s most dynamic groups in the social leadership of reform has been the Salar. The Salar were one of the officially recognized nationalities identified in the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s. A relatively small group of some 100,000 currently live along the upper reaches of the Yellow River, on the borders of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces. The Salar are characterised by their commitment to both Islam and China, and by their belief that they live in permanent exile, though there is considerable uncertainty about their origins. The evidence of recent research in Qinghai suggests the perspective of being Chinese citizens, yet a people in exile, significantly shapes recent Salar social and economic activism.
In Search of Authenticity: the ‘Global Popular’ and ‘Quality’ Culture—the Case of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Pavement
Authors: Radner Hilary
Published: September 2014

Through an examination of three special issues devoted to The Lord of the Rings trilogy in Pavement, a New Zealand magazine, I propose to discuss the way in which the representation of these films suggests the complexities of the intersection between the global and the local within New Zealand culture and its consequences in particular in terms of the marginalisation of an indigenous discourse. I draw upon the work of scholars such as T. Bennett and J. Woolacott to define and examine the “reading formations” mobilized by the LOTR phenomenon within such publications as Pavement, directed towards a local NZ ‘hip’ readership.
Imagining Union: European Cultural Identity in the Pre-Federal Future Perfect
Authors: Pratt Murray
Published: September 2014

Rather than offering a detailed analysis of the contents of the draft constitution, a consideration of the extent to which the EU is hampered in its ability to posit a counter-balance to the USAn Empire, or indeed a reflection on the economic and political ramifications of the document’s proposals, the aim of this article is to take a step back from the construction that is Europe, and pause to consider the Utopian assumptions about cultural identity which subtend the notion of union, as expressed within the draft constitution and more broadly across discourses about ‘Europeanness’ as shared destiny which underpin the European project. In order to do so, I draw on theories of national identity and belonging, at the same time interrogating the applicability of the national paradigm to that strange locality, the transnational, pan-regional, post-state, and potentially pre-federal entity which the EU is becoming. In the process, I offer readings of both the constitution, and a less official EU text, namely an online comic entitled ‘Captain Euro’ which was used to promote the single currency. I am particularly interested in investigating the narrativisation of culture and identity as a process of unification or union, and in opening up a space to consider the ideological imperatives which suture this master(ful) narrative. Slavoj Žižek’s theorisation of the moment of narrative possibility as one which occludes its own foundational basis is then considered as one which applies to a form of status denial inherent within the official European narrative of union, and through suggesting a queer reading of the Euroseminal myth of Zeus and Europa, I trace this Žižekian moment of ‘inherent transgression’ as a counter force undermining European cultural unification—paradoxically, perhaps queerly or strangely, a concomitant desire for the discrete and the separate, a drive towards distinction and difference which arises as a necessary complement to its signaled togetherness.
In Search of the Postmodern Utopia: Ben Okri’s In Arcadia
Authors: Fox Alistair Graeme
Published: September 2014

This essay explores how Ben Okri’s most recent novel, In Arcadia(2002), attempts to reconstruct the possibility of utopia in the face of a fragmentation of identity and destruction of determinate certainties affecting contemporary society in the aftermath of postmodernism. By tracing the intertextual relations existing between this work and earlier works in an intellectual/literary tradition that extends from Theocritus and Virgil through Dante, More, Milton, Sannazzaro, Sidney and others, Fox shows how Okri develops the proposition that men and women confronting an ‘empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror’ can recover sanity through art. Even though, in Okri’s vision, the world may be ‘a labyrinth without an exit’, presided over by Death without any hint of transcendence, men and women, he concludes, can recover paradise through the ‘painting of the mind’ which can creative complete forms that can be fed into ‘spirit’s factory for the production of reality’. This generative activity, which is at the heart of the Arcadian vision, in Okri’s view, has the power to make life a place of ‘secular miracles’, despite the limitations imposed upon it by the realities of finitude and death. The essay concludes by suggesting that Okri’s concept of utopia is very close to Kant’s idea of Aufklärung as expounded by Michel Foucault –– that is, neither a world era, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment, but rather a process of which men and women are at once elements and agents, and which occurs to the extent that they decide to be its voluntary actors. While in some respects Okri’s vision is strikingly similar to certain of its antecedents, it is thus nevertheless distinctively postmodern in the ways in which it is inflected.
The Elusive Search for Nora Luca: Tony Gatlif's Adventures in Gypsy Land
Authors: Blum-Reid Sylvie Eve
Published: September 2014

This essay examines Gypsy filmmaker Tony Gatlif and his 1997 film Gadjo Dilo (The Crazy Foreigner). The film ventures on the icy roads of Romania and casts a young French man in search for Nora Luca’s voice, a woman taped by his musicologist father. The young man is adopted by a Romanian Gypsy community and initiated to Gypsy culture. The film reverts stereotypes associated to Gypsies and questions the place of the white traveler in late 20th century Europe. Questions of otherness and exoticism are raised amidst the Western urge to preserve and collect other cultures. The essay is informed by current Gypsies studies on Gypsy law that locate the interaction Rom cultures have had with non-Rom cultures. The film may be seen as a trilingual road movie set in Eastern Europe, yet Gatlif, a man for whom “the road is his country” stretches the limits of the genre, usually situated in the vast open spaces of North America. Gender is important in the analysis of the film as Rom women encountered act as mediators between two different cultures and spaces. Last, the essay reconsiders the place of Tony Gatlif, a now recognized French filmmaker, a spokesperson for Gypsies who delocalised the story and traveled to Eastern Europe. An analysis of the reception of the film adds to the discussion of a filmmaker, born in Algeria, of Berber and Andalusian descent.
Introduction: Rethinking Utopia in the Wake of Postmodernism
Authors: Fox Alistair Graeme
Published: September 2014

This introduction to the special issue of Portal on 'Strange Localities: Utopias, Intellectuals, and Identities' identifies the problematical issues in postmodernism and postcolonial theory that are addressed by the essays in the special issue. It then gives an overview of the findings of the essays, and concludes by suggesting that the utopian impulse continues to be expressed in contemporary thought and writing with the aim of bringing utopian hope into an effective relationship with praxis in the here and now.
The Commons: Opening and Enclosing Non-commodified Space
Authors: Arvanitakis James
Published: September 2014

This paper begins with a simple question—‘how can you steal something that no one owns’? Though a simple question, the answer is complicated, for the stealing of ‘things’ owned by no one explains an important aspect of capitalism’s insatiable appetite. Historically the conditions for industrialisation and market economies were created by capital through the colonisation of common lands and common modes of production—things that are shared but not owned. And this is an appetite that shows no sign of abating. This paper looks at the concept of the commons as aspects of our lives that no one owns but that everyone enjoys. Today the commons are constantly under siege. However, this claim does not only refer to ‘physical’ commons; here, I extend the concept of non-commodified ‘spaces’ into the cultural sphere.

By outlining how capital continually works to enclose the commons—both physical and cultural—this paper aims to present a key contest occurring between neoliberalism and today’s social justice movements. This conflict is based on the manufacturing of scarcity through enclosure versus the concept of abundance through sharing and cooperation. The purpose, then, is to identify the source of this enclosure, and why it continues, as well as describe potential paths to challenge it.
Writing Beyond the Wall: Translation, Cross-cultural Exchange, and Chen Ran's 'A Private Life'
Authors: Schaffer Kay , Song Xianlin
Published: September 2014

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented rise in the global flow of knowledge, nowhere more apparent in the exchange of ideas between China and modern western democracies. Our interest concerns one aspect of this global flow— the translation of Chinese women’s autobiographical writing into English. Taking Chen Ran’s A Private Life (English edition, 2004) as a point of departure, the paper explores issues of translingual practice and cross-cultural exchange. It considers what escapes or is lost in translation as well as the additive potential of the host text. It is sometimes the case that the translation can deliberately make certain ambiguities visible—whether from pragmatic, market-driven motivations or from more complex political, historical and cultural considerations. These negotiations of meaning that occur in the translation process can reverberate on the critical reception of texts in both the ‘guest’ and ‘host’ languages (Liu 1995), with open-ended, incomplete and indeterminate effects.

The paper examines the effects of the omission of a brief parenthetical section of three paragraphs from one chapter of the Chinese edition of A Private Life. Yet, even that small emendation changes the original text as a cultural object and alters potential modes of its reception. In this case, the translation results in a loss of ambiguity, irony, philosophic and rhetorical sophistication while also offering additive potentials that enhance the generation of new meanings in the translingual exchange, here with reference Tiananmen and contemporary feminism in China. The translation process provides new channels for readers, writers and theorists to dialogue and communicate across gaps of difference, despite inhibiting factors like the imposition of local restraints, the universalising pressures of western modernity, and asymmetrical relations of power between guest and host language contexts.
Brides, Maids, and Prostitutes: Reflections on the Study of 'Trafficked' Women
Authors: Constable Nicole
Published: September 2014

This essay critically examines the blurred boundaries – or the analytical shadow lines – in scholarly and popular conceptualizations of Asian women migrants. I ask what women who migrate from the global South to the North as maids, brides, or sex workers have in common? How important are the commonalities and the distinctions between them? When are such blurs warranted, and what are the implications of such blurs for women’s self-perceptions and life experiences, for feminist scholarship, and for immigration policies? Drawing from ethnographic field research among Chinese and Filipina correspondence brides, Filipina domestic workers, and from the wider literature on sex workers, this essay considers some of the problems with a ‘trafficking’ framework, and considers the analytical and ethnographic possibilities that emerge with closer examination of the real and imagined shadow lines between sex workers, domestic workers, and migrant brides.
Fantastic Elements in Djebar's La Femme sans sépulture
Authors: Medeiros Ana M
Published: September 2014

Fantastic Elements in Djebar’s La Femme sans sépulture

Todorov famously defined the fantastic genre as comprising texts set in a recognisably ‘real’ world that involve the possibility, but only the possibility, of a supernatural explanation underlying the events of the story related. Where the supernatural and the natural co-exist as hypotheses within the text, the reader enters a state of hesitation concerning the status of the story-events set before her (Todorov, 1975). If this hesitation is sustained to the end, according to Todorov the text can usefully be classified as belonging to the (pure) fantastic genre.

Is La Femme sans sépulture an example of the fantastic genre? Certainly the author plays with the conventions of that genre, skilfully juxtaposing two types of explanation for the events recounted and fostering a hesitation on the part of the reader. But this is not an end in itself for Djebar. Rather, the possibility of the supernatural seems to function as a metaphor; if the ghost of Zoulikha ‘haunts’ those who live on after her disappearance (her daughters and former comrades, the narrator herself, and all those for whose freedom she fought), this means that we all owe a duty to the past. Only once she has done her duty to Zoulikha in this way can the author-narrator feel that she has truly returned home. And it is entirely appropriate to represent this relationship to the past as a kind of haunting. This is the use to which Djebar puts the idea of the supernatural; whilst celebrating and continuing Zoulikha’s struggle for the liberation of Algeria and its women, she uses the possibility of the fantastic to convey the uncanny experience of a constant return to her own (cultural) self.
Learning from the Germans? History and Memory in German and European Discourses of Integration
Authors: Beattie Andrew
Published: September 2014

History and memory appear to be increasingly important to discussions of European values and identity, as exemplified by references to ‘bitter experiences’ and ‘divided pasts’ in the draft EU constitution. The article takes recent suggestions that Europe could learn from German experiences of confronting multiple difficult pasts as its starting point, and considers critically what lessons those German experiences might in fact hold for ‘Europe’. It explores similarities and differences in the two integration contexts and their dominant approaches to, and assumptions about history and public memory. Specifically, it considers debates about the east-west division of the Cold War and about the place of communism and nazism in public memory. Contrary to common assumptions, the article argues that German experiences are not necessarily worth of European emulation.
Divergent Accounts of Equivalent Narratives: Russian-Swedish Interdevochka Meets Swedish-Russian Lilya 4-ever
Authors: Kristensen Lars Lyngsgaard Fjord
Published: September 2014

In a region that is traditionally considered to be transnational, Nordic cinema has often posed as the prime case for a transnational cinema. The paper contests this notion of Nordic transnationality by analysing two films that depict two Russian women travelling to Sweden. Interdevochka/Intergirl (Todorovski, 1989, USSR) and Lilya-4-ever (Moodysson, 2004, Sweden) challenge the inclusiveness of the region and make explicit the fact that Russian identities are not part of the homogenous mixture of the region. Instead, Russian identities of cross-border prostitution are cinematically subjected to rejection and victimisation. This paper examines how Lilya-4-ever adheres to a European anxiety narrative by performing a Russian return narrative and how Interdevochka/Intergirl portrays ‘the fallen soviet woman’ by travelling to Sweden. These cinematic representations of the female Russian identity travelling to Sweden differ from each national context, but by probing into a comparative analysis the paper will reveal that both films need the Other to narrate these stories of transnational labour migration.
‘Miki-le-toss ou comment repérer un guech en quelques leçons’: l’identité ethnique ‘tos’ en France à travers les blogs de jeunes lusodescendants ('Miki-le-toss' or How to Spot a 'Guech' in a Few Lessons: 'Tos' Ethnic Identity in France in the Blogs of French-Portuguese Youth)
Authors: Fernandes Martine
Published: September 2014

In this article, I analyze the ‘tos’ ethnic identity, as expressed in blogs written by French-Portuguese teenagers in France, also called ‘lusodescendants,’ who are the children of Portuguese residents. Starting in the eighties, the reclaiming of this ethnic identity has been reinforced by Portugal’s entry in the European Union in 1986, the institutionalization of links between the lusodescendants and Portugal, and France’s recent opening to its migrant populations. Influenced by the Chicano cultural movement, the ‘tos’ movement shares some of its foundational features: a myth of origin, a privileging of unity, and a conservative notion of family. Despite this movement’s nationalist tendencies, I argue that it does not threaten this youth’s integration to France or to Europe, especially since lusodescendants, who are often Portuguese and French nationals, feel ‘twice European.’ In their case, European identity, to which they never refer in the blogs, is a mere sum of national identities. If a common European identity were needed, it should not be in the form of assimilationist policies replacing national cultures by a ‘European culture.’ Indeed, most European countries share a history of dictatorships and nationalisms, i.e. of official cultures being forced onto people. This dictatorial and nationalist past is directly responsible for the Portuguese diaspora and the lusodescendants’ ethnic identity claims today.
From the Stereotypification of the Non-European Other to the Prototypification of the European Self: A Case Study of Turkey’s Membership to the European Union from the French Perspective.
Authors: Bogain Ariane , Potot Florence
Published: September 2014

In an era of increased globalisation, the need for a sense of belonging and an identity is becoming more pressing. The way nations form images of others and, conversely, conscious or unconscious images of themselves is becoming increasingly important as these images impact on public opinion and on political and decision-making discourse. With the development of supranationalism in Europe, the age-old notion of European identity has come more and more to the fore. Conflicting interpretations and a general disinclination to consider the matter leave the notion of European identity as polysemic as ever. Furthermore, the expansion of the EU has contributed to blurring this notion, so much so that in the collective psyche, it has become closely linked to the membership of the European Union and it is proving sometimes difficult to dissociate one from the other. In this context, the debate surrounding Turkey’s membership of the EU gives an insight into prototypical and stereotypical representations of Europe.

As the controversy has been particularly salient in France, the aim of this study is to explore the European self-conceptions and images of the other through the example of France’s opposition to Turkey’s membership of the EU. For this purpose, opinion polls and the Press will be used as forms of narrative in order to highlight these representations and how they have evolved in time. The first part of the study will concentrate on the arguments put forward to justify the opposition to Turkey joining the EU. The second part will then evaluate how the image of the other contributes to the prototypical representation French citizens have of Europe.
Of Lady-killers and ‘Men Dressed As Women’: Soap Opera, Scapegoats and the Mexico City Police Department
Authors: Lewis Vek
Published: September 2014

Over two days in October 2005, police in Mexico City conducted a series of raids on male-to-female transgender (travesti) prostitutes working in the streets. The motive of the investigation was not related to sex work at all, but rather, the hunt for a serial killer responsible for the deaths of elderly women between 2003 and 2005. With few leads apart from reports by a couple of eyewitnesses that they had seen ‘a man dressed as a woman’ enter the houses of the victims, the Chief Public Prosecutor announced that the killer could be a travesti.

On January 25, 2006, the ‘lady-killer’ was finally discovered to be neither a ‘man dressed as a woman’, nor a travesti. The suspect, a female former lucha libre wrestler, Juana Barraza, was taken into custody.

In the period leading up to the October raids, Mexico’s chief television channel, Televisa, finished up the season of its popular soap, La Madrastra, with a plot line that features a man who dresses as a woman to disguise his usual male identity and kill his female victims.

This paper examines the case, looking at the influence of the soap opera narrative in the profiling of travestis as suspect ‘men dressed as women’. It draws on studies of soap opera and mass media forms in Mexican society, as well as the work of transgender theory in understanding how crossgender identities are circumscribed by discourse.
In the Age of Schizophrenia, Icebergs, and Things that Grip the Mind
Authors: Hajdu Sue
Published: September 2014

Encountering Saigon in the early 1990s, I was confronted with an unfamiliar concept of time in photography. I am not talking about moments, the tripping of shutters, the splattering of light onto a frame of film. No, I am referring to historical time. Time as epochs. Time that lingered thick and dense like heavy wedges or chunks that could barely be budged.
Poems From/de Infernal: Romantic
Authors: Lewis Vek
Published: September 2014

These poems came about when, living in a house in Xalapa, Mexico, without a stereo and no guitar or piano to speak of, I had to invent my own music. Love is infernal, not eternal. The image of the beloved that betrays you, always an image that is both iconic and sacrilegious, an internal and infernal ecstasy that the bolero gives life to. I only realised afterwards that I had written an update of this Caribbean-Mexican genre, a mi manera. So it seemed suitable that they should be in Spanish and English (the latter my first language), exorcising both los demonios de la mirada amada y los demonios de la lengua.

These pieces come from a collection of erotic poetry accompanied by interpretive images that will be released by an art press in Spain in 2009. Infernal/romantic is one half of a collaborative project between myself, the Madrid-based Chilean poet, Violeta Medina, and several artists. The collection speaks to desires that are clearly other and demonic.
Writing Italies, an Introduction
Authors: Vanni Ilaria
Published: September 2014

This article outlines the genealogy of 'Italian cultural studies' both as a field of research and as a set of ideas around culture as a way of introducing the journal special issue.
Knowing the Place for the First Time: A Cuban Exile’s Story
Authors: Morena Alejandra , Milanes Roberto
Published: September 2014

Playa Abierta is a modern beach-side resort, one hundred kilometres west of Havana. Developed as a private resort in the 1950s, it was seized by the new revolutionary Cuban government in 1959 after its owner fled precipitately to Miami. This autobiographically centred and personally narrated paper reviews the history of Playa Abierta 1956 – 2006 through the eyes of a Cuban New Zealander ‘Marta’ whose uncle first developed the estate. In 1956 her holidays spent at Playa Abierta as a little girl were her most treasured Cuban moments. ‘At this altar’, she says, ‘my uncle was the high priest.’ In 1996 - after a 36-year absence from her native land - she returned for a visit, the only member of her extended family to have done so. Boldly and unannounced she walked through her uncle’s house – by then converted into a military recreational camp. On a subsequent visit, she met with members of her uncle’s domestic staff whose relationship to that same loved beach was by then of many decades. Whose Playa Abierta was she re-visiting now? Who were the true claimants to that family sacred site? Today as she reflects on the private and public meaning of Playa Abierta, her exultation has given way to more complex feelings. The wonder at re-discovering the beach’s beauty was overladen with the guilt of returning to Cuba while still under Castro’s communist rule. Her sense of belonging was later undermined by a sad realisation that those who had stayed behind were also Playa Abierta’s claimants. Above all, she is torn between family loyalties and the promise of a Revolution betrayed.
The Myth of an 'Invisible Mediator': An Australian Case Study of English-Japanese Police Interpreting
Authors: Nakane Ikuko
Published: September 2014

Recent studies have challenged the assumption that the interpreter is an ‘invisible’ mediator and have demonstrated a departure from the ‘conduit’ role often assigned to interpreters in their professional ethics guidelines (e.g. Russell 2000, Wadensjö 1998, 2004; Yoshida 2007). In this paper, I address the issue of interpreter’s role as an invisible mediator through an examination of interactional ‘repairs’, one of the key aspects of interaction management mechanisms in the tradition of Conversation Analysis. The context of interpreting is Australian Federal Police interviews mediated by Japanese-English interpreters. While some repair sequences in interpreter-mediated police interviews followed common patterns of monolingual police interviews, there were also some features of repairs specific to interpreter-mediated discourse. In particular, due to the interpreting of each turn, in some cases, it is not always possible to ascertain whether it was the primary speaker’s turn or the interpreted version that was the source of ‘trouble’ leading to an interactional repair. The paper demonstrates interpreters’ vulnerability to being identified as the ‘troublemaker’ in repair sequences and consequential face-saving strategies. These strategies included modifying the primary speaker’s utterances or providing explanations for why a need to repair was perceived or why a repair sequence failed to rectify a problem. It is demonstrated that in engaging in these types of problem solving activities, interpreters at times shift roles, sometimes pushing the boundaries of their professional ethics. The paper argues that, while interpreters are often viewed as operating within a third ‘invisible’ space between interlocutors, this invisibility needs to be questioned. It is suggested that the expectation of a completely invisible, or neutral, third space is unrealistic, and that interpreters as cultural and linguistic mediators, and as social beings, continuously negotiate their identity with their clients while interpreting.
For the Bicultural Happy Few Only: Didier Coste’s Days in Sydney
Authors: Jaccomard Helene
Published: September 2014

Written by Didier Coste, a French essayist, translator and academic who worked for some years in Australia, Days in Sydney is a unique bilingual novel. Instead of the accepted custom of the original text printed on the opposite page of its translation Days in Sydney contains no translation. It alternates French and English in a seamless fashion that is the antithesis of the conventions of bilingual texts, resulting in a truly heteroglossic text, elliptical in its construction as it meanders between two languages and two main characters. In the publication announcement Didier Coste stated that this unusual book was the result of an ‘nécessité esthétique et une certaine idée de la bi-culture’ aimed at ‘le petit cercle des bilingues d'Australie’. Alongside his creative output Coste has published scholarly works since the late 1980s up to 2004. In English. By examining the principles and practice of heteroglossia and by drawing on one of Coste’s recent academic article, this paper explores the twin notions of ‘nécessité esthétique”, and ‘bi-cultural’ readership to account for the (not so global) space between two languages and cultures Days in Sydney occupies.
Competing Desires and Realities: Language Policies in the French-Language Classroom
Authors: Giovanangeli Angela
Published: September 2014

French language policy has historically centred on ways French can be considered a dominant and influential language. It has done this since the Middle Ages, by allowing the French language to serve as a political tool. On an international level, language was a way of subjugating conquered peoples (former colonies). It promoted France’s international status (by the 18th century French was the diplomatic language of Europe). On a national level, the French language was one of the ways governments were able to centralise political power (suppression of regional languages).

One of the ways French language authorities have promoted the use of language has been through education policies and the way language is taught in schools. For example, the French language was imposed on the colonised territories of France through teaching in missionary schools. Within France, stringent laws were adopted, in particular during the nineteenth century, allowing the French language to replace local languages in schools. In France today, language policies continue to exist and to have an influence on the way we view language and society. One of the main priorities of French language policy is to protect the status of the national language in particular with respect to the increasing use of English as a global dominant language in areas such as science, technology, tourism, entertainment and the media (Nunan: 2007, 178). Consequently, France has adopted policies to respond to this linguistic climate. This has implications on the way the French language is taught both within France as well as outside of France.

This paper will examine some of the policies and agencies created over recent years that affect the French language. It will also identify some of the consequences these policies have on the teaching of language. Finally it will argue that a space has been created within the language classroom that attempts to find a compromise between the language policies of the French government and the realities of spoken French in society.
From Starbucks to Carrefour: Consumer Boycotts, Nationalism and Taste in Contemporary China
Authors: Nyíri Pál
Published: September 2014

In the 2000s, China has witnessed a series of consumer boycott campaigns, some of which received nationwide publicity, and one of which, the campaign against the French discounter chain Carrefour in 2008, produced street pickets. The motivation behind these campaigns has been largely nationalistic, as the brands or companies targeted were deemed to offend China. This article sketches the dynamics of consumer boycotts and asks whether, beyond being a vehicle of nationalism, the emerging politics of consumption is also becoming a tool of expressing taste.
Time-capsule: Explorations of Concepts of Time and Law in Colonial New Zealand
Authors: Barrett Jonathan , Strongman Luke
Published: September 2014

Postcolonial legal culture in New Zealand (Aotearoa) has sought to revise the past by reinterpreting Victorian legal contexts in the light of contemporary understandings of inter-cultural differences. This article develops an argument that demonstrates the relationship between cultural and legal notions of time during nineteenth century New Zealand. It examines the way in which Victorian attitudes were expressed in the expansion of colonial empire and the discursive ideologies which may have informed them. It explores the notion of time as expressed in lawmaking in colonial New Zealand through an examination of legal and philosophical commentary derived from contemporary jurisprudence and para-legal literature. The article is concerned with presenting an argument for the way in which colonial law and lawmakers manipulated the symbolic notion of time to the possible occlusion of indigenous interests in colonial New Zealand.
From Collective Memory to Transcultural Remembrance
Authors: Graves Matthew , Rechniewski Elizabeth
Published: September 2014

Over the last thirty or so years, historians and social scientists have undertaken a wide ranging exploration of the processes involved in forgetting and remembering, with a particular focus on the level of the nation-state. Their interest corresponds to the period that Pierre Nora, the French historian responsible for the ground-breaking Les Lieux de memoire in the 1980s, terms the ‘era of commemoration,’ drawing attention to what he describes as the ‘tidal wave of memorial concerns that has broken over the world.’ Across the world, nation-states have paid renewed attention to the ceremonial and observance of national days, and have undertaken campaigns of education, information, even legislation, to enshrine the parameters of national remembering and therefore identity, while organisations and institutions of civil society and special interest groups have sought to draw the attention of their fellow citizens to their particular experiences, and perhaps gain national recognition for what they believe to have been long overlooked or forgotten. This article traces the over-lapping evolution of the practices of commemoration, the politics of memory and the academic field of ‘Memory Studies.’ It seeks in particular to identify the theoretical and methodological advances that have moved the focus of the study of memory from the static and homogenising category of ‘collective memory’ to practices of remembering, and from national to transcultural perspectives.
Writing and Music: Album Liner Notes
Authors: Biron Dean Leonard
Published: September 2014

A deceptive aspect of the ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ cliché is the function of the preposition ‘about’. Literature and music, dance and architecture, painting and film – all are discrete aesthetic forms that nonetheless simultaneously feed off and provide nourishment for each other as part of art’s perpetual drive toward diversity and innovation. Nowhere is the aptness of the association between writing and music more obvious than in the phenomenon of album liner notes. Rather than merely an attempt at describing or translating musical experience, liner notes contribute to the dialogue between composer and listener and are a significant part of the culture of contemporary music.
From Gospel to Gates: Modal Blending in African-American Musical Discourse before the Signifyin(g) Monkey
Authors: Coady Christopher
Published: September 2014

Despite its origins in the literary realm, Henry Louis Gates The Signfiyin(g) Monkey: A Theory of African-American literary criticism has become a standard methodological text for the study of African-American music. Those who embrace the theory accept as the foundation of their argument an apparent link between African-American linguistic and musical realms. This short paper locates the origin of this type of modal blending in research into the rhetorical practices of Gospel services in the United States during the early 1970s. It posits that this body of work established a consensus in the field of Cultural Studies over the affinity of linguistic/musical practices in African-American culture and demonstrates that this understanding was used to justify the application of Gates theory to musical analysis in the 1990s. The ubiquity of Gates theory in the study of African-American music today is therefore shown to be the result of interdisciplinary collaboration rather than the legacy of any one particular individual.
Among Absences
Authors: Coronado Gabriela
Published: September 2014

Utilizando el género epistolar, una carta a mi madre, reflexiono sobre mi nueva vida e identidad como emigrante en Australia explorando mis percepciones sobre la diferencia cultural y lingüística. Lejos de mis hijas y nietos en México, en esta carta, tardíamente escrita, relato mis recuerdos, nostalgias y vivencias en el nuevo ambiente, y sobre todo, hablo de mis dificultades para manejar emocionalmente mi miedo a la ausencia en los momentos importantes del ciclo de vida, la enfermedad y la muerte.

Using the epistolary genre, a letter to my mother, I reflect on my life and identity as an emigrant in Australia by exploring my perceptions of cultural and linguistic difference. Far from my children and grandchildren in Mexico, in this belatedly written letter I recall my memories, nostalgic feelings and expereinces in the new environment, and above all, I speak of my difficulties in mangaing emotionally my fears of being absent in the important moments of the cycle of life, sickness and death.
Health and Borders across Time and Cultures: Introduction
Authors: Carrillo Garcia Beatriz , Ghosh Devleena
Published: September 2014

This special issue of Portal brings together papers examining the intersection of health and borders. In this analysis health is understood not only as the absence of illness, but also as knowledge, as a right, and as the pursuit of identity and self-transformation. Similarly, borders here are used as both physical and mental constructs. The special issue represent a multidisciplinary effort that looks at health from a social science perspective through historical, socio-economic, and cultural approaches. It is also concerned with the health inequities across and within national borders, due to economic imperatives, changing technologies and environments. The articles in this special issue explore lessons learned and new ways of understanding health across time and borders, with specific reference to the cases of India, Australia, Hong Kong and China, Pakistan, and Thailand.
Climate Change, Copenhagen and Psycho-social Disorder
Authors: Marshall Jonathan Paul
Published: September 2014

After the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change we need to approach analysis of the processes of negotiations and social action in a different way. In particular ideas of justice do not provide an adequate framework for dealing with the problem. This paper explores climate change and the sense of disorder it encapsulates, particularly focusing on the Copenhagen Conference but, at the daily life level, also looking at the disorder present in attempts to edit a book on climate change. Contemporary life is driven by, and conducted within, fragile and messy networks. In terms of politics it may be useful to listen to this disorder with care, rather than prematurely rush to a preconceived mode of ordering.
From the Indian Ocean to the Pacific: Affranchis and Petits-Blancs in New Caledonia
Authors: Speedy Karin Elizabeth
Published: September 2014

The sugar crisis of 1860 in Reunion motivated the migration of thousands of Réunionnais to New Caledonia. Along with sugar planters, wealthy enough to transport their production equipment as well as their indentured workers, significant groups of both skilled and unskilled labourers made their way from Reunion to the Pacific colony in the second half of the nineteenth century. In previous publications, I have focused my attention on the sugar industry and the immigration of the rich planters and their coolies. While I have drawn attention to the heterogeneity of the sugar workers and have signalled the arrival and numeric importance of tradespeople, manual and low skilled workers from Reunion, I have not yet described these immigrants in detail. This is because this group has been largely ignored by history and details surrounding their circumstances are scant. In this paper, I discuss the background and origins of these people and highlight some of the fascinating stories to emerge from this migration to New Caledonia and beyond.
Textual Subjects in Motion: Letters, Literature and Print Medium in an Indian-South African Exchange (1928-1946)
Authors: Samuelson Meg
Published: September 2014

This article traces an epistolary exchange between South Africa and India that was animated by the circulation of print media and literary texts. The exchange – between the South African archivist, poet and social historian MK Jeffreys and the Indian statesmen and scholars VS Srinivasa Sastri and P Kodanda Rao – is read as forming part of a larger web of personal and political relations and textual traffic that contributed to the production of Indian Ocean public spheres. Through engagement with this particular case study, the article seeks to contribute to the scholarly turn from explorations of relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ or along a North-South axis toward elaborating those engaging South-South connections within the Indian Ocean arena.
The Transcultural Self: Mapping a French Identity in Contemporary Australian Women’s Travel Memoirs
Authors: De Nooy Juliana
Published: September 2014

Rare during the twentieth century, at least twenty-nine book-length memoirs of Australians in France have been published since 2000. Unlike their British and American counterparts, these are overwhelmingly written by women, staying as often as not in Paris as in rural France. The relocation inevitably provides the opportunity for reinvention of the self in relation to new surroundings.

Striking is the desire among many of these writers to claim a French identity, as evidenced in titles such as: Almost French, How to Be French, My French Life. The paper seeks to understand what enables Frenchness to appear as readily accessible to this group of Australian women and what this version of Frenchness entails. It investigates what constitutes cultural belonging in these memoirs, and the ‘technologies of the self’ by means of which this new identity is crafted, assumed and circulated as a template for others to follow. Curiously, neither a high level of French language proficiency nor long-term residence are considered essential attributes. More often, the authors focus on the availability of alternative forms of female subjectivity, and the invention of a transcultural self is articulated in terms of cultural paradigms of femininity and gender relations.
Epistemology as Politics and the Double-bind of Border Thinking: Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Mignolo
Authors: Laurie Timothy Nicholas
Published: September 2014

This paper examines Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of writing and the State in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, teasing out issues of gender, primitivism and academic expertise in the authors’ claims about power and politics. While noting the benefits of politically analysing social customs and traditions, Laurie highlights the complicities between Deleuze and Guattari's theories and the assumptions embedded in their anthropological sources. He further argues that the cultural and historical speculations in Anti-Oedipus cannot be divorced from the authors' privilege of philosophy as a uniquely European creative space. Seeking an alternative perspective on cultural translation, the paper turns to Walter Mignolo’s study of the 'book' in Spanish-Amerindian colonial encounters. Foregrounding the critical value of philology for ‘de-colonising’ theory, Mignolo argues that Eurocentric cultural comparisons serve to legitimate particular ways of knowing within contested fields of representation. However, in both Deleuze and Guattari and Mignolo, the paper questions the gender dynamics of writing practices implicitly articulated in meta-narratives about the State and/or colonialism. Laurie suggests that these authors frequently remain oblivious to the role of women in the historical contexts examined, and that understanding political dynamics within cultural groups requires questioning the privilege of writing itself, both in and outside the academy. While sympathetic to the role of political philosophy in negotiating complex historical issues, this paper also advocates a rethinking of the subordinate place attributed to anthropological and historical research practices in the theoretical exegeses of Deleuze, Guattari and Mignolo.
Image, Precariousness and the Logic of Cultural Production in Hong Kong
Authors: Cartier Carolyn
Published: September 2014

Interpretations of culture in Hong Kong have tended to portray the city in terms of the vanishing present, in some combination of the instant, fleeting and disappearing. This article redresses such language of lack to consider instead how the idea of precariousness in the realm of the cultural has been less a condition of cultural production than a cultural strategy. Street art, including alternative performance art and political graffiti, has made the city itself the site of roving cultural production: walls, street surfaces and passageways accommodate forms of expression that the city’s cultural institutions have only more recently and uneasily embraced. In these different modes of time-space, contemporary alternative art occupies transitory territory and locates its ‘precariousness’ in lack of definitive status and uncertain future – mimetic conditions of defining culture in Hong Kong society itself. Its measures, by contrast, emerge in Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible: the ways in which they render what is visible, knowable and ultimately sayable. As objects generating negotiation, such contemporary cultural projects anticipate instabilities of the present, identify hegemonic political economic logics and seek modes of resistance. Within these perspectives, this discussion juxtaposes two simultaneous events: the exhibit ‘Memories of King Kowloon’ on the historic graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, and the stenciled graffiti of Ai Weiwei in public space during April and May 2011.