bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Unhomely Europes
Authors: Eleftheriotis Dimitris , Pratt Murray , Vanni Ilaria
Published: September 2014

This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. It seeks to unveil not the official historical contexts and traditions in which contemporary inventions of cultural identity occur. Rather, its aim is to discover and listen to competing voices and alternative visions—be they cultural, social, political, literary or cinematic—that give different shape to trans-European identities and model union, commonality, and belonging, according to transregional or translocal values. The special issue, then, is an exploration of possible forms of frictions occurring across the European cultural and historical landscape. It questions the pre-eminence of formal EU discourses on values, and the branding of Europe in the global marketplace, by listening to marginalised, unheard or discordant Euro-voices. The issue demonstrates the need for more rigorous theorisations of notions such as ‘value,’ whether ‘shared’ or ‘cultural,’ in the European region, and posits alternative mappings and visions of European belonging and identity. The essays included in this special issue consider Europe as a locus of frictions, consensus, tension, contestation and reconciliation. This locus is capable of co-locating Scotland with the Costa Brava, crossing Swedish views of Russia with their converse, recognising a Europe of borders that continuously unfold, acknowledging the interference of historical memories, and inflecting the Houellebecquian Euro-futurescape with Greco-Australian undertones; to cite a few examples of vibrant transvaluation occurring in the issue.
The Limits of Liberalism in Argentine Provinces 1890-1940: An Analysis of Provincial Expenditures
Authors: Ross Peter J , Levy James R
Published: September 2014

This paper examines the liberal grounded provincial societies of Argentina from 1890 to 1940. A close examination of provincial government expenditures reveals that these states spent most of their revenues on law and order and education with little being directed to social welfare and to health. This form of government was extremely limited, therefore, in providing for the welfare of most of its citizens, and left many of them excluded from full participation in the political, economic and social life of the nation. The type of liberalism espoused by the Argentine elites effectively undermined the very project of state building that they espoused and resulted in the Peronist revolution of the 1940s when the state, under the slogan of social justice, became much more interventionist in the areas of welfare, health and housing, and much more inclusionist with regard to the Argentine people as a whole. The liberal state, and this includes the provinces, became a victim of its own chosen limitations.
Discourses of Anti-corruption in Mexico. Culture of Corruption or Corruption of Culture?
Authors: Coronado Gabriela
Published: September 2014

In the context of global capitalism the so-called developing countries are considered ‘commodities’ in offer in the global economy as emerging markets or for foreign investment. Countries need to show they are potentially highly competitive with low risk. The value of country characteristics is set by globalised managerial discourses, based on postcolonial ideologies that rate cultures and societies in terms of linear notions of progress and civilisation. Cultures and behaviours are judged positively or negatively according to the position countries supposedly have in the evolution of world society. In this framework one element that countries need to eradicate or reduce in order to be seen as ‘attractive’ is corruption. Towards this aim international and national government and non-government organisations have put in place anti-corruption campaigns. In communications with the general public, these schemes represent actors and acts of corruption through discursive strategies that characterize world cultures and their links with corruption in terms of postcolonial ideologies. In this paper I focus on the implications of the metaphor ‘culture of corruption’ for rating countries, questioning its effectiveness in anti-corruption campaigns. I argue that anti-corruption instruments based on postcolonial ideologies corrupt representations of national cultures and peoples behaviours, instead of targeting local and global sectors that gain from institutionalised corruption. Through the analysis of anti-corruption cultural texts publicly available in Mexico I illustrate how the ideological misrepresentation of corruption fails its stated aim, to transform a ‘culture of corruption’ into a ‘culture of legality’.
Editor’s welcome, PORTAL, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 2008
Authors: Allatson Paul
Published: September 2014

The first issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies for 2008 is a special issue with the title “Hyperworld(s): Language, Culture, and History in the Latin American world(s),” guest edited by Jeff Browitt and Paul Allatson (University of Technology Sydney). The issue—comprising related essays and cultural works—evolved from the 2006 biennial conference of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia, “Hyperworld: language, culture, history,” held at UTS in September 2006.

The issue, like the conference before it, explores the place of Latin America in what the editors call “hyperworld(s).” The term connotes acceleration and hyperactivity on social, economic and financial levels, the intensified commodification of most aspects of human life, the time-space compression of communication and much cultural production, the re-ordering of social relations themselves over-determined by technology wedded to capitalist market values, and, as a result, the re-ordering of daily life, cultural expression, human desires, and political activism for individuals and communities across the planet. These processes and intensities mean that new modes of reading the interactive and contradictory discursive fragmentations of the current age are required. Thus, rather than regarding cyberspace as the age’s technological hallmark or dominant trope, the special issue asks how we might make deeper sense of hyperworld(s)—the bracketed plural implying myriad intersecting worlds within ‘the’ world, those worlds including various Latin Americas—by identifying how the interactive logics of virtuality suggest narratorial entry points into contemporary lived historical-material and imagined complexities and potentials in the Latin American world(s).

This issue of PORTAL also contains two essays in its general section, both dealing with Turkey. The first, by Ariane Bogain and Florence Potot, “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,” utlizes French media coverage to dissect the ambivalences and stereotypes inherent to the ongoing attempt by Turkey to become a member of the EU. The second essay, Iain Smith's “The Exorcist in Istanbul: Transnational Processes of Intercultural Dialogue within Turkish Popular Cinema,” discusses the 1974 film by Turkish director Metin Erksan, an unofficial remake of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Smith argues that the film, and its reception, calls for a reading based on a more nuanced model of cross-cultural exchange, dialogue and interaction, as befits the broader interstitial relationships through which cultures, and their cinematic and popular cultural productions, meet and interact in Europe today.

Finally, I would like to draw readers’ attention to the call for papers for a special issue on contemporary Italian cultural Studies, scheduled for July 2008.

Paul Allatson, Chair, PORTAL Editorial Committee
Language and Identities: The Exceptional Normality of Italy
Authors: Kinder John J.
Published: September 2014

Language issues loom large in current debates on Italian identity/identities, indigenous minorities in Italy and, of course, immigration. While the context of language debates in early 21st century Italy presents new realities and challenges, the fundamental issues are the same as those originally defined by the first European language planner, Dante, and reworked by successive theorists. The debates turn on exclusions and inclusions, on levels of multiple identities, on understandings of otherness. It is no accident that language is at once as a provocation for debates on identity and a metaphor of those debates, for the tensions that run through the debates lie at the heart of language itself. All cultures have a narrative that explains diversity among languages and cultures, either as the result of a mistake or as divine punishment. The Biblical accounts of Creation, Babel and Pentecost provide the framework for European understandings of language diversity. These accounts capture the paradoxical nature of human language, which characterizes us a species and is a tool for building unity between persons and groups, but is, by its nature, always and inevitably an expression of diversity, in time and space. These contradictions are being played out in current language debates as emigration, return migration, internal migration and immigration elicit new constructions of ‘Italianness’, the literary canon and the social weight of the different varieties of language present on Italian soil and in Italian communities abroad.
Tokidoki, Cute and Sexy Fantasies between East and West: Contemporary Aesthetics for the Global Market
Authors: Okayama Emiko , Ricatti Francesco
Published: September 2014

Italian art has long been identified with its nation, in spite of the complex history of Italian migration and exile, which many of its prominent artists have also experienced. This may be because Italian art has enjoyed a privileged position as a leading and somewhat self-contained centre of art and culture for many centuries. Yet, in the present globalising world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any nation to maintain cultural identity, Italy included. This paper is both a recognition and an exploration of a significant connection between Italian art and a non-European culture. It focuses on the work of a young Italian artist, Simone Legno, who works through his US-based label Tokidoki, with Japan as his artistic inspiration. We avoid considering Legno’s work as a unilateral projection of Western fantasies of the Orient, focusing instead on a complex and reciprocal set of cultural and economic influences between Japan, Italy and the USA. Japanese anime and manga are relevant to Legno's work not only for their impact on his design, but also for the emotional attachment that references to Japan can produce in consumers in Italy and other countries, consumers who grew up with Japanese anime and manga. We also challenge the centre-periphery conception of Europe-Asia relations, particularly when commenting on the recent phenomena of globalisation. Legno’s mixture of Italianess and exotic Orientalism has built bridges in the global market between Western companies and Asian consumers, as well as between Asian companies and Western consumers. We conclude that Tokidoki’s success lies in its hybridisation in a global context: the creation of new cultures of feminity by an Italian designer arising out of Japanese artistic forms of production and distribution within an economy dominated by US and multinational enterprises.
Promoting ‘Third Space’ Identities: A Case Study of the Teaching of Business Japanese
Authors: Otsuji Emi , Thomson Chihiro Kinoshita
Published: September 2014

This paper argues that the teaching and learning of a foreign language involves students in the construction of their own identities between cultural and linguistic practices. The study looks at the interconnected practices of the content of the textbook, the classroom teaching and teacher’s ideological stance in relation to students’ gender identity construction. It examines how all the practices jointly contribute to a foreign language learning experience. In particular, the construction of (gender) identities of the learners explicated through a case study of a Japanese business classroom practice.

This paper is a case study, which looks at the treatment of gender, i.e., the ways in which a textbook and a teacher address matters of gender, how two female students received input on gender representations in relation to their ideological stance and identity. Furthermore, it examines how the students responded to gender representation in the textbook, and how teacher practices impacted on this. The result of the study reveals that the students construct their own ‘third space’ in a process of adaptation and appropriation of other cultural and linguistic practices. The limitations posed on students can be addressed by awareness of ‘third space’. This paper concludes with the implication of language teaching and learning and the importance of encouraging students to make a conscious choice in order to position themselves in the ‘third space’. To this end, the explicit incorporation of ‘third space’ in teaching and learning practices on content of the textbook and classroom activities as well as the teachers involvement in creating ‘third space’ environment were proposed. Thus, it is suggested that not only students but also teachers need to reflect and enact as an agent by positioning themselves in the emancipative ‘third space’.
Translating Signs, Producing Subjects
Authors: Neilson Brett
Published: September 2014

This paper moves between two streets: Liverpool Road in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield and Via Sarpi in the Italian city of Milan. What connects these streets is that both have become important sites for businesses in the Chinese diaspora. Moreover, both are streets on which locals have expressed desires for Chinese signs to be translated into the national lingua franca. The paper argues that the cultural politics inherent in this demand for translation cannot be fully understood in the context of national debates about diversity and integration. It is also necessary to consider the emergence of the official Chinese Putonghua as global language, which competes with English but also colonizes dialects and minority languages. In the case of these dual language signs, the space between languages can neither be reduced to a contact zone of minority and majority cultures nor celebrated as a ‘third space’ where the power relations implied by such differences are subverted. At stake is rather a space characterised by what Naoki Sakai calls the schema of co-figuration, which allows the representation of translation as the passage between two equivalents that resemble each other and thus makes possible their determination as conceptually different and comparable. Drawing on arguments about translation and citizenship, the paper critically interrogates the ethos of interchangeability implied by this regime of translation. A closing argument is made for a vision of the common that implies neither civilisational harmony nor the translation of all values into a general equivalent. Primary sources include government reports, internet texts and media stories. These are analyzed using techniques of discourse analysis and interpreted with the help of secondary literature concerning globalisation, language and migration. The disciplinary matrix cuts and mixes between cultural studies, translation studies, citizenship studies, globalization studies and political theory.
Life Spectacles: Media, Business Synergy, and Affective Work in Neoliberal China
Authors: Ren Hai
Published: September 2014

The way in which Chinese media communicates the meanings of everyday life has been significantly reconfigured since the late 1970s. ‘Folk television’ or ‘life television’ has been developed as a popular television genre that focuses on ordinary people and their lived experiences. This phenomenon reflects the neoliberal development of China’s cultural institutions in general and the privatization of television production and distribution in particular. Meanwhile, cultural enterprises also shape the way in which Chinese citizens conduct themselves. In such domains as leisure and consumption, operators of theme built environments such as theme parks, theme shopping malls, and even residential communities deploy spatial planning and engineering techniques to subtly train their users to behave in a particular way to become proper citizens. This type of business through real estate development, a dominant sector of the Chinese economy, contributes to the national project of managing social risks in China’s neoliberal process. To illustrate how media and leisure companies engage in cultural production appropriate to China’s neoliberal development, this paper examines both a television production of news about ‘ordinary people’ and a theme park operation of ethnic festival by focusing on the relationship between media convergence, business synergy, and affective work.
Editors' welcome, PORTAL, Vol 7, No 1, January 2010
Authors: Allatson Paul
Published: September 2014

‘Fields of Remembrace,’ is a special issue of PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies guest-edited by Matthew Graves (University of Provence) and Elizabeth Rezniewski (University of Sydney). The issue focuses on what the guest editors call the ‘world-wide turn to commemoration in recent years,’ which is typified by the diverse drives by states, organisations, institutions and interest groups to reclaim spaces for overlooked, disputed and/or rehistoricised and refashioned memories in ways that appear to place memory at discursive odds with history. Taking a transcultural rather than transnational approach to the memory-history dyad, and attending to the potential abuses of history as pasts are rehistoricised and refashioned in line with contemporary political and cultural paradigms, the special issue makes an important contribution to contemporary memory debates. It is also a timely contribution, given the vituperative qualities of so-called history and culture wars in Australia, the USA, many parts of Europe, and throughout many parts of the decolonised world. The contributions to the special issue were first presented at a workshop entitled ‘Histories of Forgetting and Remembering’ in October 2008. The workshop was jointly sponsored by the faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney, which hosted the event, and the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney.

The special issue is dedicated to the memory of François Poirier (1947-2010), Director of the Centre for Intercultural Research in the English- and French-speaking Worlds, at the University of Paris XIII, who showed the way as one of the first scholars in France to work on the transnational dimension of memory studies: ‘Whispering lunar incantations / Dissolve the floors of memory’ (TS Eliot).
Zhang Ziyi and China’s Celebrity–Philanthropy Scandals
Authors: Jeffreys Elaine M
Published: September 2014

In January 2010, the internationally acclaimed Chinese actor, Zhang Ziyi, became a focus of public criticism for allegedly defaulting on a pledge to donate one million yuan to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake disaster-relief fund. That earthquake not only killed 70,000 people and left five million homeless, but also produced a dramatic rise in individual and corporate philanthropy in China. Philanthropic donations in 2008 amounted to a total figure of 100 billion yuan, exceeding the documented total for the preceding decade. Zhang’s ‘failed pledge’ led fans and critics to accuse her in interactive media forums of both charity fraud and generating a nationwide crisis of faith in the philanthropic activities of the rich and famous. Dubbed ‘donation-gate’, the ensuing controversy obliged Zhang Ziyi to hire a team of USA-based lawyers, to give an exclusive interview to the China Daily, and to engage in renewed philanthropic endeavours, in an effort to clear her name. Hence, contrary to claims that celebrity philanthropy is an apolitical mode of philanthropy, an examination of the Zhang Ziyi scandal and its disaster-relief precursors demonstrates that celebrity philanthropy in the People’s Republic of China is a political affair.
Post Impressions: Music Writing as Bent Travelogue
Authors: Taylor Hollis
Published: September 2014

The wind is our universal musician and has been recognized as such for millennia. If the wind can play a fence as an aeolian harp, then a violinist armed with a bow could also cause these gigantic structures to sing. Thus, an American woman and an Australian man set out to explore and perform on the giant musical instruments covering the continent of Australia: fences. This presentation excerpts highlights from the voyage, illuminating the range of sounds to be drawn out of a five-wire fence. Playing fences reveals a sound world that is embedded in the physical reality and the psyche of the culture. In pursuit of their instruments, including the Rabbit-Proof Fence and the 5300-kilometre–long Dingo Fence, the duo travels 40,000 kilometres, engaging with a singing dingo, an auctioneer, an Aboriginal gumleaf virtuoso, bush musicians, the first (now ruined) piano in Central Australia, and the School of the Air’s distorted, modulating, phasing white and pink electronic noise.

PLEASE NOTE: there are four supplementary files that accompany this contribution. Click on the tab 'Supplementary Files' on the right hand side of the screen when accessing the pdf of the article.
Working to Design: The Self-Perpetuating Ideology of Rock or ... ‘The New Bob Dylan’
Authors: Scannell John
Published: September 2014

This premise of this article is that music and the writing process have no inherent kinship, and that the often ill-conceived merger of these activities as the “music writing” process, is generally destined for failure. That is because writing about music subsumes its affective power into a foreign modality; it is captured and rendered into the printed word, made to signify, made to represent something, where that something is generally resolved within the presuppositions of the writers’ often-limited referential framework. At the heart of the matter is that writing about music often does not attempt to capture the affective processes that inspired creation in the first place, and in this respect, the paper argues that it may be more appropriate for the music writer/journalist to respond in kind, or as Deleuze and Guattari might say, that the music writing process should pursue a ‘becoming-music’ itself. For rather than subjecting music to the realm of representation, or subsuming its creative power within the realm of opinion and cliché, the writer should instead be concerned with harnessing and re-channelling those forces of sensation or affect that gave rise to it in the first place, and which might, in turn, inspire a literary creativity that is commensurate to the power of the music at hand.
Rock critics as 'Mouldy Modernists'
Authors: Shepherd Becky
Published: September 2014

Contemporary rock criticism appears to be firmly tied to the past. The specialist music press valorise rock music of the 1960s and 1970s, and new emerging artists are championed for their ‘retro’ sounding music by journalists who compare the sound of these new artists with those included in the established ‘canon’ of rock music. This article examines the narrative tropes of authenticity and nostalgia that frame the retrospective focus of this contemporary rock writing, and most significantly, the maintenance of the rock canon within contemporary popular culture. The article concludes by suggesting that while contemporary rock criticism is predominately characterised by nostalgia, this nostalgia is not simply a passive romanticism of the past. Rather, this nostalgia fuels a process of active recontextualisation within contemporary popular culture.
Prospects for the General Election of 2020: Tradition and Transition in Chinese Politics
Authors: Goodman David SG
Published: September 2014

The decision by the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 to move to open direct national elections was taken in order to ensure political stability and continued economic growth, and to enhance its position of leadership. The first national general election in 2015 followed in the wake of the landmark Constituent Assembly. Victory in 2015 by the Chinese Communist Party has been accompanied by political stability and sustained economic growth. Though there is likely to be greater competition in the General Election of 2020 the principle change in politics has been the emergence of significant public policy debate. Issues of corruption, housing, and regional development are likely to be major considerations during the election, alongside debate on the simultaneous referenda that have been called on Tibet and federalism.
Medical Connections and Exchanges in the Early Modern World
Authors: Pearson Michael Naylor
Published: September 2014

For most of human history there have been extensive exchanges of medical information all over Eurasia. Some diseases were considered to be geographically determined, and hence had to be cured using local knowledge. Other ailments were found in many places, but cures could differ according to location. Most healers, whether book based or experiential, took a non-judgemental approach to different healing methods, as seen especially in India in the early colonial period.
The Transmission of Chinese Medicine in Australia
Authors: Garvey Mary
Published: September 2014

The paper explores some of the issues concerning the transmission of Chinese medicine in Australia, its practitioner training and the future of Chinese medicine as a distinct medical discipline in the Australian context. In China over the last century Chinese medicine was overhauled in order to align it with the biomedical perspective prevalent in the West. These changes, in turn, had important consequences for the transmission of CM in Australia and the West. But while the biomedicalisation of CM has offered the path of least resistance, it has also lead to unworkable simplifications and methodological failures. The paper thus argues for a renewed access to the tradition’s primary sources in order to ally the distinctive features and methods of traditional practice with biomedicine, as an alternative to an outright integration into biomedical practice.
Clinics of Oblivion: Makeover Culture and Cosmetic Surgery
Authors: Jones Meredith
Published: September 2014

This paper examines cosmetic surgery tourism, arguing that it can be meaningfully analysed as part of makeover culture. It shows that while cosmetic surgery tourism sits at a junction of cosmetic surgery and medical tourism, it also has much in common with contemporary tourism practices. The paper posits cosmetic surgery tourism not only as an economic and globalised phenomenon but also as a set of practices that are experienced, and that take place on the body (see also Cook, 2010; Bell et al. 2011). Chris Rojek’s work on contemporary tourist practices is deployed in order to argue that the cosmetic surgery tourist’s body is itself the ‘site’ to be visited and discovered; it is also the souvenir that is brought home. When body and site are brought together in cosmetic surgery tourism, they form a potent nexus that is unique to a contemporary moment tied up with globalisation and consumption, where both identity and self-transformation are managed through the body.
The Smell of Memories. A Mexican Migrant’s Search for Emotional Sustainability through Mexican Films.
Authors: Coronado Gabriela
Published: September 2014

For more than 10 years living as a Mexican migrant, between two countries (Mexico and Australia), two cities (Mexico City and Sydney), and two social worlds (Mexican and multicultural Australian ‘families-friends’), I have been immersed in a systematic process of self observation and self reflection on my life in my country of destination. During this time I have explored my memories of place and their relationship with my emotional experiences, looking for strategies to continue to be connected with my country of origin and my people. In this process I discovered films were especially significant in sustaining me emotionally. I benefited from the memory associations triggered by representations of Mexico in films produced by Mexicans or by filmmakers from other nationalities. By reflecting on my responses to those films, in this paper I explore how representations of their country of origin can impact on migrants’ emotional life. Using autoethnography, examining my own subjectivity as a way to arrive at a deeper grasp of these processes, I analyse the roles played by different senses in the process of recollection and in the emotional effects produced, which come to embody the experience. My particular focus in this article is the sense of smell triggered by complex interactions within the sensorium while watching films, producing associations and feelings through which I re-live my memories and maintain my emotional sustainability.
Shifting Global Climate Governance: Creating Long-Term Goals Through UNFCCC Article 2
Authors: Fisher P. Brian
Published: September 2014

I argue that the long-term risk of global climate change has been mischaracterized as an environmental issue, and therefore, solutions based solely on national emission targets will be ineffective. Thus, this paper argues for establishing long-term goals emphasizing both adaptation and clean energy to generate equitable and effective global climate policy that addresses this fundamental threat. This requires defining and operationalizing the overall objective contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A second key aspect to operationalizing Article 2 is to understand those ‘particularly vulnerable’ as declared in the Article and in various climate agreements. Once operationalized, these long-term objectives can be achieved through approaches that emphasize the development of clean energy (and concomitant technology), and adaptation within vulnerable communities in their local context. It necessitates dropping formal mechanisms at the current core of the regime designed to regulate national emissions, and instead build the core of the regime around the ‘stabilization’ of both the climate system through clean energy and vulnerable people through effective adaptation.
Exclusive Minilateralism: An Emerging Discourse within International Climate Change Governance?
Authors: McGee Jeffrey Scott
Published: September 2014

Over the past five years there have been a series of significant international climate change agreements involving only elite state actors. The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, APEC Sydney Leaders Declaration and US Major Economies Process all displayed a shift towards a model of international climate change governance involving a small group of economically powerful states, to the exclusion of less powerful states and environmental NGOs. The modest result from the UNFCCC COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 and subsequent UNFCCC meetings has strengthened calls for international climate governance to be pared down to smaller decision making forums of key states only. This article argues that these developments evidence an emerging discourse of ‘exclusive minilateralism’ in international climate policy that is challenging the inclusive multilateral discourse that has formed the bedrock of international climate change governance since the inception of UN climate regime in the early 1990s. The exclusive minilateralism discourse offers a significant challenge to both the cosmopolitan and discursive democratic aspirations of international climate change governance. One response to the exclusive minilateral discourse is to reform the UNFCCC consensus-based decision making rule to provide the COP with greater ease of decision making on key issues relating to mitigation and adaptation. Another response is to more formally include the exclusive minilateralism discourse within the UNFCCC COP process. This could be achieved by forming a small peak body of states and key NGO groups to act as an influential advisor to the COP process on key issues requiring expedition and resolution.
Modern China’s Idols: Heroes, Role Models, Stars and Celebrities
Authors: Jeffreys Elaine M
Published: September 2014

This paper examines the diversity of China’s popular culture idols with reference to a commemorative website called ‘The Search for Modern China’, which was launched in late September 2009 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party on 1 October 1949. The website’s framing narrative suggests that the history of idol production and celebrity in the PRC can be viewed crudely as marked by disjuncture: the decline of heavy-handed Party-state involvement in the propagandistic manufacturing of socialist idols of production, followed by the grafted-on rise of western-style media-manufactured celebrities as idols of capitalist consumption. However, an analysis of the website’s pantheon of idols reveals that while some idols from the Maoist and early reform period have been relegated to the realm of fiction, revolutionary kitsch or are now simply passé, others remain very much alive in the popular imagination. A state-led project of promoting patriotic education has ensured the coexistence in commercial popular culture of revolutionary idols and contemporary celebrities, via memory sites associated with broadcast television, DVDs and the Internet, and the historical locations, museums and monuments of ‘red tourism.’
Woven Webs: Trading Textiles around the Indian Ocean
Authors: Davidson Lola Sharon
Published: September 2014

Throughout its long history, the changing networks of the Indian Ocean textile trade have served as circuits of material communication, transmitting cultural values embodied in cloth, defining and redefining identities and relationships. This paper explores some of the cultural ramifications of this venerable trade. From ancient times, India was a major exporter of textiles, sitting at the centre of a complex regional network of exchanges which inserted Indian cottons and silks as prestige items into the textile regimes of societies all around the Indian Ocean. The balance between indigenous production marking local identity and Indian imports marking elite status and trans-local identity was disrupted by the spread of the competing globalisations of Islam and Christianity. Colonialism expanded networks and forged new connections, redirecting a significant portion of production through metropolitan centres towards a global market and facilitating a dynamic process of cultural exchange. By the late 20th century India was no longer the dominant player in a regional system, but one of several players in a global system. Nevertheless, within this new system particular networks continue to connect the disparate communities of the Indian Ocean and to play a complex role in negotiating identification with and resistance to competing globalisations.
Créolité and Réunionese Maloya: From ‘in-between’ to ‘Moorings’
Authors: Muecke Stephen
Published: September 2014

At the beginning of October 2009, UNESCO announced that the culture of maloya, a genre of song and dance from the island of Réunion, would henceforth become an international heritage item. The Geneva committee, in placing this endangered form of culture under their protection, defined it as a ‘type of music, song and dance native to the island of Réunion’. There is nothing unusual in the fact that a marginal item of ‘immaterial’ culture, originating from a tiny speck of France in the Indian Ocean, should be noticed by an international organisation and ‘protected’ in this way. This discussion paper investigates versions of creole and créolité and the role of theory in the kind of advocacy that promoted maloya. It argues that ‘moorings’ (Vergès and Marimoutou), as a concept for creolisation studies, is more robust, concrete and precise than Bhabha’s ‘in-between’.
Banaras in the Indian Ocean: Circulating, Connecting and Creolizing Island Stories
Authors: Ravi Srilata
Published: September 2014

What links Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s 1788 novel about Isle de France, Paul et Virginie, with V.S. Naipaul’s 1972 piece, An overcrowded Barracoon? What is common to Joseph Conrad’s 1910 novella, A Smile of Fortune, and tourist brochures of La Grande Baie? What brings together the story of the ruins of Babylon and the Ghats of the Ganges? Actually, these seemingly disjointed narratives make up a vast library of inter-connecting Indian Ocean island stories. In this study I will use the image of ‘Banaras’ as the locus of an inter-textual reading exercise connecting the literary spaces of Mauritian writer and filmmaker Barlen Pyamootoo with other stories like those mentioned above. Pyamootoo’s literary universe reveals to us the dynamic, multilayered and polyphonic nature of Indian Ocean island cultures.
News for Consumer Citizens: Corporate Pressure, Political Criticism and Middle Class Assertion in the Indian Media
Authors: Rao Ursula
Published: September 2014

Mass media have always played a crucial role for negotiating the image of the nation. This holds true also for India. My article reflects changes in the Indian media market and examines how reshaped media outlets contribute towards generating fresh images of the nation for public consumption. The focus is on English language newspapers which are consumed by the growing Indian middle classes. How do newspapers influence the relation between commerce and politics and shape its public images? The case study elaborates the role journalists play towards shaping a public culture that devalues politics and hails consumerism. I argue that in a high pressure corporate environment reporters find a new voice as political commentators while accommodating within a discursive formation that promotes positive thinking about corporations, markets and commodities. News articles are an uneasy compromise that implement companies’ directives, realise a critical political ethos and expresse a longing for a new India.
Eating the Asian Other? Pedagogies of Food Multiculturalism in Australia
Authors: Flowers Rick , Swan Elaine
Published: September 2014

Public pedagogies in tourism and education in Australia suggest that food is a medium through which we learn more about each other’s cultures: in other words food is a pedagogy of multiculturalism. Drawing on a white Anglo Australian man’s memories of food in different intercultural encounters, this paper prises open the concept of eating the Other. There has been trenchant critique of food multiculturalism and the consuming cosmopolitan in Australia (Hage 1997; Probyn 2004; Duruz 2010). Thus, several writers critique the prevailing idea that eating ethnic food is a sign of cosmopolitanism, and even anti-racism, in individuals and cities in Australia (Hage 1997; Sheridan 2002; Duruz 2010). Hence, the notion of eating the Other has been taken up to discuss how ethnicity becomes an object of enrichment for white people through the eating of ethnic food in restaurants (Hage 1997) and cooking ethnic food at home (Heldke 2003).

In this paper we present an ‘entangled’ story of Frank which includes white expatriate masculinity, multiculturalism with ethnics and what Heldke calls ‘colonial food adventuring’. Drawing on a close reading of Frank’s story, we argue that an evaluation of food multiculturalism needs to historicise, gender and racialise inter-cultural food encounters. Thus, we argue that there are ethnic food socialities other than those of home-building or restaurant multiculturalisms. We suggest that culturalist and political economy pedagogies of food multiculturalism could be augmented by one that attends to the production of whiteness and gender.
Axolotl/Bichos Raros Crónica
Authors: Chávez-Silverman Susana
Published: September 2014

In this crónica, I pay homage (and talk back to!) one of my favourite authors, Julio Cortázar, who I had the great privilege and pleasure of befriending in 1980, when he was a visiting professor at UC-Berkeley. I have been obsessed with time-travel, doubling, and interstitiality since I was very young; even the most casual Cortázar reader (if such a thing is possible) will immediately recognise these as recurrent themes in his work. Here, faced with several actual axolotl in a Buenos Aires aquarium, I explore and comment on Cortázar’s strangely mesmerising meditation on identity and transformation. My personal connection is (as in much of my writing) concerned with aspects of gender and sexuality suppressed or (more likely) ignored in Cortázar’s version. I identify, too, with a poignant in-betweenness and ambiguity I read in the figure of the axolotl—and in the work of Cortázar and Alejandra Pizarnik.
Cosmocracy - A Hymn for the World? Reflections on Michel Serres and the Natural World
Authors: Zournazi Mary
Published: September 2014

This essay explores Michel Serres's most recent book, Biogea. In doing so, it tracks Serres's philosophical trajectory and offers some ideas toward a new ecology of seeing.
Civilising the Citizens: Political Slogans and the Right to the City
Authors: Marinelli Maurizio
Published: September 2014

This paper focuses on the artwork of Chinese artist Zhang Dali entitled ‘The Slogan Series.’ Zhang uses a particular technique of text and image juxtaposition to engage with the civic political slogans that were plastered on the streets of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games. His ‘Slogan Series’ consists of large paintings: each of them reproduces the human face of a common person, either in red and white or in black and white, which is literally covered by repeated civic political slogans. The paper investigates the origin of Zhang’s artwork, shedding light on the aesthetics and socio–political implications of a double juxtaposition: in the government’s ‘new citizenship’ campaign, the slogans are juxtaposed with the cityscape, while in Zhang Dali’s work the slogans are imposed on the common people’s faces.
History Writ Large: Big-character Posters, Red Logorrhoea and the Art of Words
Authors: Barmé Geremie R.
Published: September 2014

The starting point of this paper is the 1986 artwork of the then Xiamen-based artist Wu Shanzhuan, called ‘Red Humor’, which reworked references to big-character posters (dazi bao 大字报) and other Mao-era forms of political discourse, recalling the Cultural Revolution. It explains how Wu’s installation offered a provocative microcosm of the overwhelming mood engendered by a logocentric movement to ‘paint the nation red’ with word-images during the years 1966-1967. This discussion of the hyper-real use of the dazi bao during China’s Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-1978) allows us to probe into ‘the legacies of the word made image’ in modern China. The paper argues that, since the 1980s, Wu Shanzhuan has had many emulators and ‘avant-garde successors’, since we have seen multiple examples of parodic deconstructions of the cultural authority of the Chinese character (zi) in recent decades.
Countergradient heat flux observations during the evening transition period
Authors: Blay-Carreras E. , Pardyjak E. R. , Pino D. , Alexander D. C. , Lohou F. , Lothon M.
Published: September 2014

Abstract. Gradient-based turbulence models generally assume that the buoyancy flux ceases to introduce heat into the surface layer of the atmospheric boundary layer in temporal consonance with the gradient of the local virtual potential temperature. Here, we hypothesize that during the evening transition a delay exists between the instant when the buoyancy flux goes to zero and the time when the local gradient of the virtual potential temperature indicates a sign change. This phenomenon is studied using a range of data collected over several intensive observational periods (IOPs) during the Boundary Layer Late Afternoon and Sunset Turbulence field campaign conducted in Lannemezan, France. The focus is mainly on the lower part of the surface layer using a tower instrumented with high-speed temperature and velocity sensors. The results from this work confirm and quantify a flux-gradient delay. Specifically, the observed values of the delay are ~ 30–80 min. The existence of the delay and its duration can be explained by considering the convective timescale and the competition of forces associated with the classical Rayleigh–Bénard problem. This combined theory predicts that the last eddy formed while the sensible heat flux changes sign during the evening transition should produce a delay. It appears that this last eddy is decelerated through the action of turbulent momentum and thermal diffusivities, and that the delay is related to the convective turnover timescale. Observations indicate that as horizontal shear becomes more important, the delay time apparently increases to values greater than the convective turnover timescale.
Constraining terrestrial ecosystem CO2 fluxes by integrating models of biogeochemistry and atmospheric transport and data of surface carbon fluxes and atmospheric CO2 concentrations
Authors: Zhu Q. , Zhuang Q. , Henze D. , Bowman K. , Chen M. , Liu Y. , He Y. , Matsueda H. , Machida T. , Sawa Y. , Oechel W.
Published: September 2014

Abstract. Regional net carbon fluxes of terrestrial ecosystems could be estimated with either biogeochemistry models by assimilating surface carbon flux measurements or atmospheric CO2 inversions by assimilating observations of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Here we combine the ecosystem biogeochemistry modeling and atmospheric CO2 inverse modeling to investigate the magnitude and spatial distribution of the terrestrial ecosystem CO2 sources and sinks. First, we constrain a terrestrial ecosystem model (TEM) at site level by assimilating the observed net ecosystem production (NEP) for various plant functional types. We find that the uncertainties of model parameters are reduced up to 90% and model predictability is greatly improved for all the plant functional types (coefficients of determination are enhanced up to 0.73). We then extrapolate the model to a global scale at a 0.5° × 0.5° resolution to estimate the large-scale terrestrial ecosystem CO2 fluxes, which serve as prior for atmospheric CO2 inversion. Second, we constrain the large-scale terrestrial CO2 fluxes by assimilating the GLOBALVIEW-CO2 and mid-tropospheric CO2 retrievals from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) into an atmospheric transport model (GEOS-Chem). The transport inversion estimates that: (1) the annual terrestrial ecosystem carbon sink in 2003 is −2.47 Pg C yr−1, which agrees reasonably well with the most recent inter-comparison studies of CO2 inversions (−2.82 Pg C yr−1); (2) North America temperate, Europe and Eurasia temperate regions act as major terrestrial carbon sinks; and (3) The posterior transport model is able to reasonably reproduce the atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which are validated against Comprehensive Observation Network for TRace gases by AIrLiner (CONTRAIL) CO2 concentration data. This study indicates that biogeochemistry modeling or atmospheric transport and inverse modeling alone might not be able to well quantify regional terrestrial carbon fluxes. However, combining the two modeling approaches and assimilating data of surface carbon flux as well as atmospheric CO2 mixing ratios might significantly improve the quantification of terrestrial carbon fluxes.